System and method for the creation and use of visually-diverse high-quality dynamic layouts

ABSTRACT

A website building system (WBS) includes a layout database to store at least one layout having components and an associated layout signature. It also includes a unit to determine a component set signature for an incoming component set having an existing layout provided by a user, to compare the component set signature with at least one associated layout signature of at least one layout from the database to find a match and to replace the existing layout with one of a selected diverse alternative candidate layout from the database according the match. The layout signature and the component set signature represent a hierarchical composition of the semantic types of the components of the layout and of the incoming component set accordingly. A layout adapter and applier adapts content from the user supplied component set to the selected diverse alternative candidate layout.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No.16/907,337 filed Jun. 22, 2020 which is a continuation of U.S.application Ser. No. 15/653,568 filed Jul. 19, 2017, which is acontinuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 14/699,828 filed Apr. 29,2015, which claims benefit from U.S. Provisional Patent Application No.61/985,489, filed Apr. 29, 2014 all of which are hereby incorporated inits entirety by reference.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to website building systems generally andto layout in particular.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Website building systems have become very popular and allow novicewebsite builders to build professional looking and functioning websites.Many of these systems provide both the novice and experienced user waysof building websites from scratch.

A website building system may be a standalone system, or may be embeddedinside a larger editing system. It may also be on-line (i.e.applications are edited and stored on a server), off-line or partiallyon-line (with web sites being edited locally but uploaded to a centralserver).

Websites are typically made up of applications and a visually designedapplication typically consists of pages which may be displayedseparately and contain components. Components are typically arranged ina hierarchy of containers (single page and multi-page) inside the pagecontaining atomic components. A multi-page container may displaymultiple mini-pages. Pages may also include list applications and thirdparty applications.

Pages may also use templates—general page templates or componenttemplates. Specific cases for templates include the use of anapplication master page containing components replicated in all otherregular pages, and the use of an application header and/or footer (whichrepeat on all pages). The arrangement of components inside a page iscalled the layout.

SUMMARY OF THE PRESENT INVENTION

There is provided in accordance with a preferred embodiment of thepresent invention, a website building system (WBS) that includes alayout database to store at least one layout and an associated layoutsignature, the layout comprising components, where the layout signaturerepresents a hierarchical composition of the semantic types of thecomponents of the at least one layout; a unit implemented on a processorto determine a component set signature for an incoming component sethaving an existing layout provided by a user, to compare the componentset signature with at least one associated layout signature of at leastone layout from said layout database to find a match and to replace theexisting layout of said incoming component set with one of a selecteddiverse alternative candidate layout from the layout database accordingto said match. The user supplied component set represents at least oneof: an entire page and a subset of components of a page of a websitebuilt by said website building system and the component set signaturerepresents a hierarchical composition of the semantic types of thecomponents of the incoming component set. It also includes a layoutadapter and applier to adapt content from the user supplied componentset to the selected diverse alternative candidate layout.

Moreover, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the system further includes a page analyzer to at leastanalyze the user supplied component and at least to generate theassociated component set signature, a signature comparer to perform thecomparison of the component set signature with at least one associatedlayout signature of at least one layout from the layout database, alayout searcher and generator to at least acquire from at least thelayout database a set of candidate layouts according to the results ofthe signature comparer, the candidate layouts having diverse layoutsfrom each other and said existing layout, where said layout searcher andgenerator includes at least one of a visual page comparer to determinethe level of similarity between a first candidate layout, the existinglayout and from a second candidate layout and a diversifier to determinean extent of diversity between said first candidate layout, an existinglayout and from the second candidate layout according to the output ofthe visual page comparer.

Further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the system includes a page spider to retrieve at least one ofnew and updated website pages, templates and manually created layoutsfrom an associated application repository and pages from externalsources, where the page analyzer operates on component sets of thespider retrieved new and updated website pages, templates and manuallycreated layouts from an associated application repository and pages fromexternal sources instead of operating on the user supplied componentset.

Still further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the page analyzer includes a semantic link handler toidentify semantic links which connect at least two components in atleast one of at least one website page, a manually created layout andthe user supplied component set and to build a relevant data structure,a layout splitter to divide at least one of the at least one websitepage and the user supplied component set into segments according to atleast one of geometrical considerations, the semantic links and dynamiclayout anchors and a signature extractor to extract at least one of afull component set signature and a partial component set signature fromthe user supplied component set and where the signature extractorperforms at least one of semantic type mapping of the components,dividing sematic types according to visual properties of the componentsand generating signature elements according to multiple componentsemantic types. The page analyzer also includes at least one of a pagetype identifier to determine the page type of at least one of the atleast one website page, a manually created layout and the user suppliedcomponent set; a component splitter to split at least one component ofat least one of the webpage and the user supplied component setaccording to the content of said at least one component, a componentfilter to filter to filter out unsuitable components for the signatureextractor, a component merger to unite at least two components forlayout processing and signature extraction by the signature extractor;and a container handler to reduce the amount of different component setsignatures for the user supplied component set by performing at leastone of using hierarchical signatures, container flattening, containerflattening and reconstruction, single component container replacement;dominant type selection and recursive implementation and where the pagegenerates at least one of a single full page layout, multiple partialpage layouts, multiple segmented layouts and an associated layoutpackage after processing by at least one of: the layout splitter, thesignature extractor, the page type identifier, the semantic linkhandler; the component splitter; the component filter; the componentmerger and the container handler.

Additionally, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the page analyzer also includes a layout quality rater tocalculate a quality score in order to filter out low-quality pages of atleast one of: the at least one layout and the candidate layoutsaccording to at least one of page statistical metrics, page visualattributes, content and a layout quality rater learning system, and aranker to order at least one of the layouts generated by the pageanalyzer and the candidate layouts according to at least one of:component size matching, semantic similarity to the component setsignature of the user supplied component set and component sizematching.

Additionally, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the layout searcher and generator includes a server basedlayout handler to perform at least one of: retrieving candidate layoutsfrom the layout database, completing partial candidate layouts andcombining of at least two of segmented candidate layouts, anautomatically generated layout handler to perform at least one ofcreating said automatically generated layouts according to thecomponents in the component set and completing the partial candidatelayouts retrieved by the server based layout handler; and a matcher tocreate the match of components between the user supplied component setand the candidate layouts where the match is at least one of: exact andpartial.

Moreover, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the automatically generated layout handler includes anautomatically generated layout coordinator to receive at least one of: abase component set of the component set and a base component set ofcomponents missing from an associated the partial candidate layout fromthe server based layout handler and to create multiple possiblealgorithmically-generated layouts from the base component set, and atleast one of a column layout generator to place components from the basecomponent set into one column after the other, a main and side barlayout generator to place components from the base component set in amain column followed by a smaller side-bar and a rule based generator toplace components from the base component set according to pre-definedplacement rules.

Further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the server based layout handler includes a server basedlayout coordinator to perform at least one of receiving the usersupplied component set and the associated component set signatures,querying the layout database using the component set signatures,retrieving the set of candidate layouts and coordinating completion ofat least one of: the partial candidate layouts and segmented candidatelayouts retrieved from the layout database, a partial layout handler tosend components missing from the partial candidate layouts to theautomatically generated layout handler and to use the resultingautomatically generated layout to complete the partial candidatelayouts; and a segment layout handler to combine the segmented candidatelayouts into a full layout according to pre-defined rules.

Still further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the layout adapter and applier includes a component typeconversion handler to convert the type of each component in the usersupplied component set to the type of each matching component in theselected candidate layout; a component attribute applier to applyattributes to components in the user supplied component set from theuser selected diverse alternative candidate layout, and at least one ofa dynamic layout handler to transfer over the dynamic layout explicitanchors and relationships from the user supplied component set to theuser selected diverse alternative candidate layout, a container changeapplier to adapt containers from the user supplied component set to theuser selected diverse alternative candidate layout, a split/mergecomponent handler to perform at least one of: splitting and mergingcomponents in the user selected diverse alternative candidate layout, aremaining component handler to handle components which appear in theuser supplied component set but are not included in the user selecteddiverse alternative candidate layout; and a post processor to performreverse transformations made by the page analyzer when necessary.

Additionally, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the candidate layouts are acquired according to at least oneof: a full component set signature of the user supplied component set, apartial component set signature of the user supplied component set, atleast one segment component set signature of the user supplied componentset and an automatically generated layout.

Moreover, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the comparison is according to at least one of: semanticabstraction and semantic distance metrics.

Further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the associated layout package includes at least one of: theuser supplied component set for the webpage, page type indication,component and container split/merge information, the dynamic layoutanchors, semantic links, component relevance information, pagescreenshot, the associated component set signatures and the associatedwebpages.

Still further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the user selected diverse alternative candidate layout isaccording to the match of components.

There is provided in accordance with a preferred embodiment of thepresent invention, a method for a website building system (WBS). Themethod includes storing in a layout database at least one layout and anassociated layout signature, the layout including components, where thelayout signature represents a hierarchical composition of the semantictypes of the components of the at least one layout; determining acomponent set signature for an incoming component set having an existinglayout provided by a user; performing a comparison of the component setsignature with at least one associated layout signature of at least onelayout from the layout database to find a match; replacing the existinglayout of the incoming component set with one of a selected diversealternative candidate layout from the layout database according to thematch, where the user supplied component set represents at least one of:an entire page and a subset of components of a page of a website builtby the WBS, where the component set signature represents a hierarchicalcomposition of the semantic types of the components of the incomingcomponent set and adapting content from the user supplied component setto the selected diverse alternative candidate layout.

Moreover, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the method includes at least analyzing the user suppliedcomponent set, at least generating the associated component setsignature, performing the comparison of the component set signature withat least one associated layout signature of at least one layout from thelayout database, at least acquiring from at least the layout database aset of candidate layouts according to the results of the performing thecomparison, the candidate layouts having visually diverse layouts fromeach other and the existing layout, where the at least acquiring from atleast the layout database a set of candidate layouts includes at leastone of: determining the level of similarity between a first candidatelayout, the existing layout and from a second candidate layout, anddetermining an extent of diversity between the first candidate layout,the existing layout and from the second candidate layout according tothe output of the determining the level of similarity.

Further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the method also includes retrieving at least one of: new andupdated website pages, templates and manually created layouts from anassociated application repository and pages from external sources; andwhere the analyzing operates on component sets of the retrieving insteadof analyzing the user supplied component set.

Still further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the candidate layouts are acquired according to at least oneof: a full component set signature of the user supplied component set, apartial component set signature of the user supplied component set, atleast one segment component set signature of the user supplied componentset and an automatically generated layout.

Additionally, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the analyzing the user supplied component set includesidentifying semantic links which connect at least two components in atleast one of: at least one website page, the user supplied component setand building a relevant data structure, dividing at least one of: the atleast one web site page and the user supplied component set intosegments according to at least one of: geometrical considerations, thesemantic links and dynamic layout anchors; extracting at least one of: afull component set signature and a partial set signature from the usersupplied component set and where the extracting performs at least oneof: semantic type mapping of the components, dividing sematic typesaccording to visual properties of the components and generatingsignature elements according to multiple component semantic types, andat least one of: determining the page type of at least one of: the atleast one website page and the user supplied component set, splitting atleast one component of at least one of: the webpage and the usersupplied component set according to the content of the at least onecomponent; filtering out unsuitable components for the extracting;uniting at least two components for layout processing and signatureextraction by the extracting and reducing the amount of differentcomponent set signatures by performing at least one of: usinghierarchical signatures, container flattening, container flattening andreconstruction, single component container replacement; dominant typeselection and recursive implementation and where the generating diversealternative layouts generates at least one of a single full page layout,multiple partial page layouts, multiple segmented layouts and anassociated layout package after at least one of: the identifying, thedividing, the extracting, the determining, the filtering, the splitting,the uniting and the reducing.

Further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the associated layout package includes at least one of theuser supplied component set for the webpage, page type indication,component and container split/merge information, the dynamic layoutanchors, semantic links, component relevance information, pagescreenshot, the associated component set signatures and the associatedwebpages.

Still further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the method includes calculating a quality score in order tofilter out low-quality pages of at least one of: the at least one layoutand the candidate layouts according to at least one of page statisticalmetrics, page visual attributes, content and a layout quality raterlearning system, and ordering at least one of the at least one layoutand the candidate layouts according to at least one of: component sizematching, semantic similarity to the component set signature of the usersupplied component set, and component size matching.

Additionally, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the at least acquiring includes performing at least one of:retrieving the candidate layouts from the layout database, completingpartial candidate layouts and combining of at least two of segmentedcandidate layouts, performing at least one of: creating theautomatically generated layouts according to the components in the usersupplied component set and completing the partial candidate layoutsretrieved by the performing at least one of: retrieving the candidatelayouts from the layout database, completing the partial candidatelayouts and combining of at least two of segmented candidate layouts,and creating the match of components between the user supplied componentset and the candidate layouts where the match is at least one of: exactand partial.

Moreover, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the performing at least one of: retrieving the candidatelayouts from the layout database, completing the partial candidatelayouts and combining of at least two of segmented candidate layoutsincludes receiving at least one of: a base component set of the usersupplied component set and a base component set of components missingfrom an associated partial candidate layout, from the performing atleast one of: retrieving the candidate layouts from the layout database,completing partial candidate layouts and combining of at least two ofsegmented candidate layouts and creating multiple possiblealgorithmically-generated layouts from the base component set, and atleast one of: placing components from the base component set into onecolumn after the other, placing components from the base component setin a main column followed by a smaller side-bar and placing componentsfrom the base component set according to pre-defined placement rules.

Further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the performing at least one of: creating the automaticallygenerated layouts according to the components in the user suppliedcomponent set and completing the partial candidate layouts retrieved bythe performing at least one of: retrieving said candidate layouts fromthe layout database, completing the partial candidate layouts andcombining of at least two of the segmented candidate layouts includesperforming at least one of: receiving the user supplied component setand the associated component set signatures, querying the layoutdatabase using the associated component set signatures, retrieving theset of candidate layouts and coordinating completion of at least one of:the partial candidate layouts and the segmented candidate layoutsretrieved from the layout database; sending components missing from thepartial candidate layouts for the performing at least one of: creatingthe automatically generated layouts according to the components in thecomponent set and using the resulting automatically generated layout tocomplete the partial candidate layouts, and combining the segmentedcandidate layouts into a full layout according to pre-defined rules.

Still further, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention, the user selected diverse alternative candidate layout isaccording to the match of components.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The subject matter regarded as the invention is particularly pointed outand distinctly claimed in the concluding portion of the specification.The invention, however, both as to organization and method of operation,together with objects, features, and advantages thereof, may best beunderstood by reference to the following detailed description when readwith the accompanying drawings in which:

FIG. 1 is a schematic illustration of an example webpage to be adapted;

FIG. 2 is a schematic illustration of a sample user interface displayinga selection of possible alternative layouts for the example webpage inFIG. 1 , constructed and operative in accordance with a preferredembodiment of the present invention;

FIGS. 3A and 3B are schematic illustrations of a system for producingvisually diverse alternative dynamic layouts for a website, constructedand operative in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention;

FIG. 4 is a schematic illustration of the relationship between theconcepts of page, layout, match and signature, constructed and operativein accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 5 is a schematic illustration of the page analyzer of FIGS. 3A and3B, constructed and operative in accordance with a preferred embodimentof the present invention;

FIG. 6 is a schematic illustration of layout splitting for an end-to-endintersection case, constructed and operative in accordance with apreferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 7 is a schematic illustration layout splitting for a complexmargin/content case, constructed and operative in accordance with apreferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 8 is a schematic illustration of a page layout which includes acontainer component;

FIG. 9 is a schematic illustration of a semantic tree which includescontainer types;

FIG. 10 is a schematic illustration of container flattening, constructedand operative in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention;

FIG. 11 is a schematic illustration of container flattening andreconstruction, constructed and operative in accordance with a preferredembodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 12 is a schematic illustration of problem cases in containerflattening and reconstruction;

FIG. 13 is a schematic illustration of single component containerexpansion and matching, constructed and operative in accordance with apreferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 14 is a schematic illustration of matching a virtual componentgenerated following dominant contained component detection; constructedand operative in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention;

FIG. 15 is a schematic illustration of a suggested layout constructionfor the recursive application method of container handling, constructedand operative in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention;

FIG. 16 is a schematic illustration of layout to layout mapping madepossible through component splitting, constructed and operative inaccordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 17 is a schematic illustration of a simple semantic tree;

FIG. 18 is a schematic illustration of a section of a semantic treeshowing use of semantic sub-types;

FIG. 19 is a schematic illustration of a stratified semantic tree;

FIG. 20 is a schematic illustration of a stratified semantic tree withpaths of different length in the same strata;

FIG. 21 is a schematic illustration of the elements of the layout filterand ranker of 3A and 3B, constructed and operative in accordance with apreferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 22 is a schematic illustration of the implementation of the layoutsearcher and generator of FIG. 3A, constructed and operative inaccordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 23 is a schematic illustration of the implementation of the AGLhandler of FIG. 22 , constructed and operative in accordance with apreferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 24 is a schematic illustration of the implementation of the SBLhandler of FIG. 22 , constructed and operative in accordance with apreferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 25 is a schematic illustration of a weighted semantic tree;

FIG. 26 is a schematic illustration of a weighted semantic tree with anextra component node;

FIG. 27 is a schematic illustration of the creation of partial layouts,constructed and operative in accordance with a preferred embodiment ofthe present invention;

FIG. 28 is a schematic illustration of an example of handling asegmented layout constructed and operative in accordance with apreferred embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 29 is a schematic illustration of attribute-based componentmatching integrating semantic linking information, constructed andoperative in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the presentinvention;

FIG. 30 is a schematic illustration of the elements of the layoutadapter/applier of FIG. 3A, constructed and operative in accordance witha preferred embodiment of the present invention; and

FIG. 31 is a schematic illustration of joint result diversification formultiple layout database queries, constructed and operative inaccordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration,elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale.For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggeratedrelative to other elements for clarity. Further, where consideredappropriate, reference numerals may be repeated among the figures toindicate corresponding or analogous elements.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PRESENT INVENTION

In the following detailed description, numerous specific details are setforth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the invention.However, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that thepresent invention may be practiced without these specific details. Inother instances, well-known methods, procedures, and components have notbeen described in detail so as not to obscure the present invention.

An alternative way for a user to update or change their website is tochange the layout of a current website based on the content andstructure within so that only the actual layout changes and the contentis preserved. Current systems typically run algorithms that search for alayout visually similar to the model layout provided by the user.

Applicants have realized that an alternative method may be a system thatmay generate a layout which is visually different from the model layout,but is sufficiently equivalent to be able to store and present the sameunderlying content. These layouts may be used to provide designalternatives to an existing page design created by a user, to providesuggested layouts for data collections which do not have a currentdesign (such as imported data which has yet to be organized) and toallow pages created using a given template to be used with alternativetemplates.

Applicants have further realized that the stored layouts may be dynamicand may also be subject to dynamic layout processing as discussed in USPatent Publication No 2013-0219263 entitled “A Server Based Web SiteDesign System Integrating Dynamic Layout and Dynamic Content” published22 Aug. 2013, incorporated herein by reference and assigned to thecommon assignee of the current invention. Therefore, the stored layoutsmay automatically be adapted for different amounts of component content.

It will be appreciated that a set of relevant components on a page or apart thereof (i.e. a subset of the components in a page) may beconsidered a given handled component set as described in more detailherein below. Applicants have further realized that it is possible toprovide a diverse set of high-quality semantically-equivalent layoutalternatives for a given handled component set. Thus, a designer couldapply a selected suggested layout to the handled component set. It willbe appreciated that such a system may also allow designers to addcomplementary information to their layout designs which could supportthe system in locating these designs and even apply them at a laterstage to the handled component set.

Reference is now made to FIG. 1 which illustrates an example page to beadapted. The page contains one picture component P1 and 3 textcomponents T1, T2 and T3. These components may be considered the handledcomponent set.

Reference is now made to FIG. 2 which illustrates a pop-up menu which isactivated by pressing (as an example) the “Magic Layout” button. Thispop-up menu displays the result of a query made against a layoutdatabase using the specific handled component set or an automaticallygenerated layout based on the specific handled component set (asdiscussed in more detail herein below). The pop-up menu in thisimplementation displays an outline of each of the suggested layouts. Inthis implementation, whenever the designer may hover his cursor over oneof the suggested layouts in the pop-up menu, the edited page istemporarily adapted to the suggested layout pointed to by the mouse.

Applicants have further realized that such a system may provide a layoutmarketplace to designers which may present to a user layouts that havebeen prepared in advance for use by the system, layouts collected fromvarious sources (and possibly filtered for diversity and quality) andautomatically generated layouts created based on the components in thehandled component set and layout creation rules (as described in moredetail herein below).

Applicants have realized that searching for layouts which aresemantically equivalent or close to the handled component set (thecurrent page) may be done by extracting (one or more) signatures whichrepresent the semantic composition of the handled component set and thepre-indexed layouts. It will be appreciated that the handled componentset is the collection of components used for layout searching (which isalso subject to layout modification), whereas the signature is a stringor vector which includes semantic information about the handledcomponent set in a summarized form.

Each signature may include a count of the number of semantic componenttypes at various level of details (e.g. [1 text, 2 images, 1 gallery] or[3 visuals, 1 gallery]) as discussed in more detail herein below.

Reference is now made to FIGS. 3A and 3B which illustrate a system 100for generating visually diverse alternative dynamic layouts for awebsite according to an embodiment of the present invention. FIG. 3Aillustrates system 100 during finding visually diverse and semanticallysimilar candidate layouts for an incoming request page and FIG. 3Billustrates layout collection and indexing. System 100 comprises aclient 5 and a server 15. Server 15 may further comprise an applicationmanager 10, an application repository 20, a page editor 30, a pagespider 41, a page analyzer 44, a layout filter and ranker 45, a layoutadapter and applier 50, a layout searcher and generator 60, a layoutdatabase 70 and a layout database coordinator 75. Layout databasecoordinator 75 may further comprise a signature comparer 77 as describedin more detail herein below. Application repository 20 may hold versionsof the pertinent website pages which may be retrieved by applicationmanager 10 when required, as well as additional related data (such asapplication metadata and dynamic layout information). Page editor 30 maybe a suitable graphical user interface which may allow editing of pagesand may act as an interface between the user and system 100 whenproviding manual input to the process. Page editor 30 may also comprisea previewer 32 so that previews of layouts and final adaptations may bepresented to the user as described in more detail herein below.

As is illustrated in FIG. 3A to which reference is now made, pageanalyzer 44 may pre-process and analyze an incoming user page suppliedvia page editor 30. Layout searcher and generator 60 may search layoutdatabase 70 according to the given handled component set of the incominguser supplied page and may locate candidate layouts and perform resultmatching. Layout filter and ranker 45 may perform filtering and rankingon the candidate layouts. Layout adapter and applier 50 may adapt thehandled component set to a new selected layout, chosen by a user from aset of compatible candidate layouts. Layout searcher and generator 60may also generate a number of additional automatically generated layoutsto be ranked and possibly presented to the user together with thelayouts located in the layout database 70 (as described in more detailherein below).

As is illustrated in FIG. 3B to which reference is now made pageanalyzer 44 may pre-process and analyze an incoming webpage retrieved bypage spider 41 to produce candidate layouts which are filtered andranked by layout filter and ranker 45 before being stored on layoutdatabase 70 for use for layout searching and generating as describedherein above

It will be appreciated that a single system 100 may comprise more thanone layout database 70. The elements of system 100 are discussed in moredetail herein below.

Layout database 70 may store layouts based on pages collected frommultiple sources together with associated layout packages as describedin more detail herein below. Layout database 70 may also store the fullpages from which layouts may be extracted to be presented when required.Layout database 70 may be a user-specific layout database or agroup-specific layout database or both as described in more detailherein below. It will be appreciated that system 100 may comprise ofmore than one layout database 70 of differing quality layouts.Typically, the best quality is that of a manually created layout,followed by layouts based on the current website building systemdesigner sites followed by that of external designers as discussed inmore detail herein below.

It will be appreciated that server 15 may be a separate server or one ofthe regular system servers. Some of the functionality of the server mayalso be implemented on client 5 as well (such as expanding the querybased on semantic type equivalence, and passing such expanded queries tothe server to be resolved as described in more detail herein below).

It will also be appreciated that server 15 may also include options toexplicitly insert, modify or delete layouts—so that employees of thewebsite building system vendor may insert, modify or delete specificlayouts. This may also be relevant, for example, for a user-specificlayout database 70 which may allow a user to manage his or her layoutrepository.

It will be further appreciated that the architecture of system 100 maybe described in terms of page, layout and match as is illustrated inFIG. 4 to which reference is now made. As discussed herein above, asignature (used for searching) may be extracted from the layout. It willbe appreciated that the layout (L1) may be similar to the page (P1), butwith the background and decorations removed. The signature extractedfrom layout L1 (as described in more detail herein below) may becompared against other signatures of pre-prepared layouts held in layoutdatabase 70. The match (M1) may be a subset of the layout fields in L1,matched against the layout fields of a selected layout from layoutdatabase 70 as described in more detail herein below.

Page P1 may be the complete visual entity handled by system 100 as shownto the user. It may be a full website building system page (as describedabove), or a part thereof (if the system supports pagepartitioning—automatic or manual—which allows parts of a page to behandled).

Page P1 may include actual components (some of which form part of thelayout L1 (as shown in FIG. 4 ), decoration components, components fromtemplates, a header, a footer etc. and various page-level attributes notrelated to any specific component (e.g. a generic background color orstyle guideline).

Layout L1 may be the set of actual components from P1 to be matched (onboth the incoming page request side and on the layout database 70side)—this is the level at which the layout searching and matching maybe performed as described in more detail herein below. As is illustratedin FIG. 4 , L1 may differ from the set of components in P1 since it doesnot contain any decoration components and does not contain anycomponents which should not be part of the matching process—asdetermined by system 100 or marked by the user as described in moredetail herein below. This could be due to their type (for example), orby an arbitrary user decision.

Layout L1 may also omit locked components. System 100 may allow a userto define locked components which are locked in position. Such lockedcomponents may not participate in the searching and matching processes(and may also be excluded from additional system processes such asdynamic layout). Layout L1 may also be limited through specific manualselection by the user, e.g. “suggest alternative layouts for componentsX and Y and Z only (and leave the other page components in place)”.

Layout L1 may also contain new components (which are not present in P1)generated from existing page components through component splitting anduniting. L1 may also contain components generated or modified due tocontainer processing as discussed in more detail herein below. Layout L1may also contain information on component relationships generatedthrough semantic analysis of the components in the page, e.g. “definecomponent A and B as linked component pair (caption+picture) and suggestalternative layouts which have a similar linked component pair”.

For all candidate layouts that are found, system 100 may match betweenthe current user layout and a candidate layout. The subset of components(in each of the two matched layouts) may be called a match, i.e. thereis a current user layout match and a candidate layout match.

It will be appreciated that the matched components on each side of thematch (the handled component set of the incoming request page/candidatelayout) are matched but are not identical—they may typically havedifferent size and position, and may very well have different types.There may also be remaining components on both sides—contained in thelayout but not in the match. Their handling is discussed herein below.

It will be further appreciated that system 100 may maintain the two wayrelationship between the various elements of page P1, layout L1 andmatch M1. This way any changes (in layout or content) applied toelements of Layout L1 (for example), may also be applied to thecorresponding elements on page P1.

A set theory containment relationship may typically apply between thethree entities, i.e. Match ⊆ Layout ⊆ Page (subject to the multipleexceptions noted above such as split/united components). However, thisis not geometrical containment, i.e. non-layout components may begeometrically intermixed with layout components.

It will also be appreciated that layout database 70 may be indexedaccording to the signatures extracted from the layouts. Layout database70 may also store an associated layout package containing informationregarding associated pages, dynamic layout anchors, semantic links,signatures etc. together with the layouts as described in more detailherein below. Such layout package may contain the full originalpages—allowing the system to easily re-extract the signatures if thesignature extraction algorithm is modified. In an alternativeembodiment, layout database 70 may be implemented using the layoutsalone, and the minimal information needed to perform semantic linkmatching (without any additional information)—the non-layout pagecomponents may be discarded and not stored in layout database 70.

System 100 may also store in layout database 70 a screen shot of theoriginal page, so to present to the user a “full view” of the suggestedlayouts, and not just an abstract layout view. System 100 may also storea pre-processed version of the layout suitable for quick generation of apreview of the suggested layouts with the user content.

It will be appreciated that system 100 may be aimed at designers using atypical website building system and as such may run within the contextof the typical website building system. Thus, a large amount of data maybe available to system 100—far more than that available to a layoutselection system aimed at regular (non-typical website buildingsystem-based) web sites. This is particularly correct for fully on-linetypical website building systems.

For example, system 100 may collect actual data on layouts that weredisplayed to designers, and the specific layouts that were actuallyselected, and use this data in rating layouts for display. Suchstatistical data may also extend to end-user (rather than designer)activities. Thus system 100 may, for example, use the information on thenumber of actual views for a given page (i.e. its end-user accessstatistics—not just designer access statistics).

As discussed herein above, system 100 aims to provide a diverse set ofhigh-quality layout alternatives. Thus, the layout searching processdoes not aim to find layouts which are visually similar to the handledcomponent set, but rather layouts which are visually different from thehandled component set, but still contain a similar (or at leastsemantically equivalent) composition of components. An example of thismay be a house built from Lego™ blocks (commercially available from theLEGO Group). If Lego creations are equated to web-pages and the Legoblocks to components, system 100 may offer the user different creationswhich use the same or similar set of blocks (contained in the house) butmay not necessarily be in the form of a house.

It will be appreciated that a diverse set query results is desirable,i.e. relevant results which are not only visually different from thehandled component set, but also differ from each other. It will befurther appreciated that the results should furthermore be high-quality.Thus, system 100 may rank results according to their design quality (asdescribed in more detail herein below), removing low quality results,and displaying the results in decreasing order of quality.

It will also be appreciated that since the last two requirements(diversity and quality ranking) interact, the actual display order ofthe layout found may be based on a combination of quality and diversityrequirements—as well as semantic similarity to the handled componentset. This way, high-diversity results (i.e. matching layouts which aresubstantially different from other matching layouts) may have a higherdisplay priority than a value assigned simply based on their quality.

It will be appreciated that page spider 41 may gather and index new andupdated pages, templates and manually created layouts from applicationrepository 20. Page spider 41 may also acquire pages from externalsources 25 (e.g. via the internet), keeping a retrieval link to originalpage for use in updates (based on integration with the website buildingsystem), and possibly a copy of the full original page. It may alsoacquire layouts manually created for system 100 and system templates(full-page and partial). This could be based on the amount ofusage/viewing for the specific template. Page spider 41 may also acquiredesigner-created pages which may be created by designers internal to thewebsite building system vendor (e.g. internal design studio) or otherdesigners (e.g. designer arena, general designer population). It may beappreciated that in this scenario, this would be subject to privacyrequirements—the designer may specify the availability of his or herlayouts for other designers to use with a default privacy policyapplied. Such privacy options may include “allow using pages”, “do notallow using pages” and “allow using in outline format only” (i.e.removing actual content from the page). The selection of which pages touse may be further based on popularity criteria, such as only fromdesigners having a given experience, only from designers which createdmore X web sites/pages through the system or only from designers givenan explicit rating above X (in systems which support designer/end-userfeedback to designed pages).

The selection may also be based on the amount of use of the givenpage/template by the designer itself or other designers, based on thenumber of views for the specific page or the website containing it,based on registration/participation of the designer in a layoutmarketplace (as described in more detail herein below) and also based ona manual “featured layout” indication (similar to featured/promotedsearch results in a search engine).

It will be appreciated that page spider 41 may run just once when layoutdatabase 70 is set up, may be manually initiated, may be set to run atfixed time intervals, may be set to run when there are changes(exceeding a certain threshold) made to application repository 20, onevery save or based on designer submissions.

As discussed herein above, system 100 may also support group-specificlayout databases 70 which store a set of layouts for use by certaingroups of users (e.g. defined by the website building system vendor orby the users themselves). It will be appreciated that for group-specificlayout databases 70, Page spider 41 may collect as noted above butpossibly also allow editing by an assigned group manager (e.g. avertical market manager defined by the website building system vendor).

System 100 may also support user-specific layout databases 70 whichstore a set of layouts for use by a given user. For user-specific layoutdatabases 70, Page spider 41 may include arbitrary pages as desired bythe user, who may manage his or her layout database content.

It will be appreciated that the aim of system 100 is to retrieve pagesand create from them full page layouts (when found). It may also extracta set of possible partial layouts and may also segment the page(whenever possible) so that layout searcher and generator 60 may findmatching segment layouts (and combine them) as described in more detailherein below.

As discussed herein above page analyzer 44 may analyze and pre-processan incoming webpage in order to generate layouts with associatedsignatures and layout packages as described in more detail herein below.Page analyzer 44 may also receive an incoming request page from a uservia editor 30 together with an associated handled component set whichmay represent either the entire page or a partial set of components ofthe page in order to generate full page, partial page and segments ofcomponent with their associated signatures and layout packages asdescribed in more detail herein below. Such pre-processing may includecomponent splitting, unification and modification as well as thecreation of semantic relationships between components which may affectany adapting later on in the process. Component modification may includecontainer handling in particular. The pre-processing may also involvesplitting the entire layout into two or more layouts (partial layouts),which may require more than one signature (as discussed in more detailherein below). It will be appreciated that page analyzer 44 may notmodify the original layout of the pertinent page (which can be a handledcomponent set or a pre-stored layout) but instead may create alternativeversions with a 2-way mapping between the components in each layout.These alternative layouts may be the ones used to be presented ascandidate layouts for retrieval by layout searcher and generator 60.Page analyzer 44 may include information about this 2-way mappingtogether with the generated layout, and may include additional hintsabout the handling of the generated layout when matching it to retrievedlayouts. The mapping and the hints are later handled by layout searcherand generator 60 as described in more detail herein below.

Reference is now made to FIG. 5 which illustrates the elements of pageanalyzer 44. Page analyzer 44 may comprise a page type identifier 140, asemantic link handler 141, a layout splitter 142, a container handler143, a component splitter 144, a component filter 145, a componentmerger 146 and a signature extractor 147.

It will be appreciated that page analyzer 44 may support the ability ofsystem 100 to find matching layouts for an incoming request page on onehand and may also increase the accuracy (i.e. precision of the foundlayouts compared to the requirements) on the other. While usually thereis a tradeoff between the two, the processing performed by page analyzer44 may include methods to increase the coverage without harming theaccuracy, and other methods to improve accuracy with limited effect onthe coverage.

It will be appreciated the page analyzer 44 may be used by system 100during different stages of the process. During layout collections andindexing when page spider 41 retrieves pages for potential layouts, itmay analyze them in order to produce derived layouts with associatedsignatures as well as other associated information which may be usedlater on in the process (as described in more detail herein below).During runtime, when layout searcher and generator 60 searches forsuitably matching layouts for an incoming page request from a user (asdescribed in more detail herein below), it may be used to analyze andpre-process the incoming page in order to extract the associatedsignatures from the handled component set ready for use for the matchingprocess (as described in more detail herein below). Therefore in thediscussion below concerning page analyzer 44, some processes describeits use during layout collections and indexing and some during theprocessing of an incoming request page for use by layout searcher andgenerator 60.

As discussed herein above, a set of relevant components on a page may beknown as a handled component set. A handled component set may befull-page representing the entire page or partial-page representing apartial section of a page. A handled component set may also represent amere segment of a page too.

A full-page handled component set may include the set of components inthe page itself which may include or exclude components inherited from afull-page template (also known as a master page). It may also include aspecific full-page template or both components and a template togetherwith the matching header and footer.

A partial-page handled component set may include just the site header orfooter, the components contained in a given single-page container, thecomponents contained in a given mini-page of a multi-page container orcomponents defined inside list applications discussed in US PatentPublication No. 2014/0282218 entitled “Device, System, and Method ofWebsite Building by Utilizing Data Lists” published 18 Sep. 2013,incorporated herein by reference and assigned to the common assignee ofthe current invention. A partial-page handled component set may alsoinclude the components in a single inherited component set template andan arbitrary subset of the components in a page (e.g. selected usingmulti-selection).

It will be appreciated that the set of components (in both cases) willbe the one affected by the selected layout of a user, i.e. these are thecomponents which would be moved/resized according to the selectedlayout.

It will also be appreciated that components coming from a template mayinclude components from a page template (master page), common pageheaders/footers, component set templates and views inside listapplications. Such template-originated components may participate in thehandled component set for the purpose of retrieval of layouts via thegiven handled component set.

However, the resulting handled component set layout changes do notaffect the original template since changes to the original template'slayout may create unpredictable side effects on other pages using thesame templates. This may be implemented by copy-on-use website buildingsystems and inherit-on-use website building systems.

In copy-on-use website building systems, the components in the templateare copied to the page upon creation, but then become regular pagecomponents and are not linked to the original template anymore. In thisscenario, there is no problem in modifying template-originatedcomponents layout, as these are separate copies and the originaltemplate is not affected.

In inherit-on-use website building systems, the template-originatedcomponents displayed in the page are actually instances of the templatecomponents and retain their link to the original components (in thetemplate). In this scenario, such components may be included in thehandled component set only if the website building system implementslocal modifiers, i.e. the ability to create local changes to specificattributes of template-originated components, with these changes storedtogether with the specific instance. The layout modifications totemplate-originated handled component set components would then bestored as such local modifiers.

It will be appreciated that system 100 may support a notion of generalpage type selected from a short list of possible page types—page typetaxonomy. Such taxonomy may include, for example, home page,informational page, contact form page and forum page. Page typedetermination may apply to both the indexed pages and the handledcomponent set.

Page type identifier 140 may recognize the type of page to be processedand may allow the user to limit processing to only to pages whose typematch that of the handled component set (including pages whose typecould not be determined). Alternatively, all page types may beprocessed. If the handled component set is a partial-page handledcomponent set, page type identifier 140 may determine that a page typedoes not apply.

Page type identifier 140 may determine the page type using the page typeset for the page when it was created (in the specific instance or in thetemplate from which the page was inherited). For example, the Wix system(www.wix.com) allows the designer to select the following page typeswhen creating a page: blank, about, services, contact, blog, gallery,site content, music and video, online store.

Page type identifier 140 may also determine the page type by usingautomatic recognition based on visual features of the page (as isdescribed for example in article by Christian K. Shin, David S.Doermann—1999 “Classification of document page images based on visualsimilarity of layout structures”http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=100.1.10.420.9759&rep=repl&type=pdf).

It will also be appreciated that a page may be un-typed i.e. a designermay base it on a blank template (which has no pre-specified type), andan automatic type determination algorithm might also fail to classify agiven page.

It will be further appreciated that the page type taxonomy given aboverefers to generic page types. System 100 may use alternate or additionalpage type taxonomies, such as these referring to vertical markets (e.g.musicians, photographers etc.). In this case page type identifier 140may analyze the semantic structure of the page and actual content (e.g.text or image field content) to determine a detailed page type, and usethis type for later layout database selection and querying (e.g. havinga specific layout database for musician web sites etc.).

Semantic link handler 141 may implement semantic links which connect twoor more components. These may be used by component merger 146 andcomponent splitter 144 as discussed in more detail herein below. It willbe appreciated that semantic links connect components which were relatedin some way in the original layout or page, including (for example)components identified as related or “should be nearby” during pagepre-processing, such as an image and its associated caption.

Semantic link handler 141 may also implement a semantic link which doesnot allow an interfering component (of specific types or of any type),i.e. it is permissible for linked component A and B to be further fromeach other, as long as no component C (of a given type or of any type)is between them.

Semantic link handler 141 may also connect components created due tocomponent splitting, such as a text component which was split into twotext components (heading and body components). Semantic link handler 141may also connect components based on existing dynamic layout anchorsconnecting the two components.

It will be appreciated that semantic links may be used later on in thematching process so that when a component matching is performed (i.e.components in the handled component set and the candidate layout arematched), priority is given to satisfying the semantic link requirementsas described in more detail herein below.

Semantic link handler 141 may also implement multi-component semantictypes such as the ImageWithCaptionText semantic type. Such types providean additional way to represent the existence of a semantic link betweenmultiple components, and match such semantically-linked components withsimilar sets of semantically-linked components in other layouts.

Layout splitter 142 may perform layout splitting if the layout can beeasily divided into two or more sub-layouts. For example, a two-wayhorizontal or vertical splitting may be used based on the H/V slicingalgorithms described US Patent Publication No. 2015/0074516 entitled“System and Method For Automated Conversion of Interactive Sites andApplications to Support Mobile and Other Display Environments” published12 Mar. 2015, incorporated herein by reference and assigned to thecommon assignee of the current invention. Such splitting is furtherdemonstrated in FIG. 6 to which reference is now made. Layout A is splitinto two sub-layouts B and C which are used for further layoutsearching. It should be noted that component d in layout A is assignedto layout B even though some part of it crosses into the area “covered”by layout C.

Layout splitter 142 may also apply a more complex division, such as theone demonstrated in FIG. 7 to which reference is now made, which isbased on locating “clear pathways” through the split layout, rather thanusing end-to-end intersecting lines. In this example, layout splitter142 splits the “frame/margins” area A from the “internal content” areaB—possibly representing menus and content area respectively. Layoutsplitter 142 may also implement separation of an internal region fromits enclosing “frame”.

Layout splitter 142 may apply various limits and parameters, e.g.minimal number of components per split region and may also split pagesby visible page structure, employing image processing techniques such asanalysis of regions having higher level of “activity” or more details.

It will be appreciated that the discussion above regarding layoutsplitter 142, covers the scenario in which a user may request fromsystem 100 an alternate layout for an arbitrary subset of the componentsin page.

Furthermore, layout splitter 142 may divide the page into segments inany manner (such as illustrated in FIG. 7 ), and system 100 may try tolocate alternative layouts for each of the segments. Suggested layoutsmay in general be adaptable to any required target area size. However,in practice, there could be many constraints and limitations on thepossible target sizes, e.g. due to objects having specific size oraspect ratio limitations (such as pictures which need to retain theiraspect ratios, third party applications which only provide instanceswith specific sizes, Facebook like buttons which can only be displayedin certain sizes etc.)

Thus, in both cases above (arbitrary handled component sets andarbitrary page segments), the located alternative layouts may not beaccurate or easily adaptable to the target area. In particular, sincesystem 100 does not know in advance what the expected target area sizefor the layout is, there is no way to manually create in advancehigh-quality layouts which are optimized for a given target area size.

Furthermore, in the first case (in particular) there may be additionalcomponents (not included in the handled component set) which intersectwith the suggest layouts. In such a case, even if the system locateslayouts with the same dimensions as the handled component set, theselayouts may likely intersect with the additional components and maycreate a non-aesthetic result.

However, many web sites are vertically-oriented—they have a fixed widthand the pages can only be scrolled vertically (if at all). This is adirect result of the well-known propensity of web user for pages whichonly scroll vertically. Furthermore, the fixed width is typicallyselected from a very small set of common predefined widths (e.g.matching the typical display screens' horizontal resolutions). Thus, avariant of the system can be optimized for this common case ofvertically-oriented pages using a width selected from a small set ofpredefined widths.

In this variant, websites are created using one of predefined widths(though the pages may vary in height) and are marked with this width.

Manually created layouts are also created and optimized for one of thepredefined widths, and are marked as optimized for the given width.

Layout searcher and generator 60 may search for layouts limiting thesearch to layout marked with a given width—the one associated with theweb site.

When selecting a handled component set, the user may only select anentire page or a full vertical segment of a page (which include all ofthe components in a given vertical range [y1 . . . y2]). The containmentdefinition may refer to components fully contained in the range, or tocomponents intersecting the range. Thus, layout splitter 142 is limitedto splitting the page vertically, i.e. using end-to-end horizontal lineto cut it into full-width segments.

Thus, when searching for candidate layouts, system 100 can be sure thatall suggested layouts will fit their position in the page perfectly.Since the page width is identical to that of each handled component setor segment, layouts created for full pages will also be used (and areoptimized) for each such handled component set or segment.

Furthermore, since each segment essentially includes all componentsbetween y1 and y2 (y1<y2), when system 100 replaces the segment with asuggested layout, the components above the segment (y_(bottom)<y1) mayremain the same, and the components below the segment (y_(top)>y2) mayfollow directly the new layout of the affected segment, regardless ofthe new segment layout's height. Thus, there would be no overlappingbetween unaffected components and the new segment layout on either x ory axis.

Container handler 143 may implement a number of methods for the handlingof container components. In order to lower the amount of different pagesignatures (and by that, cover more user pages), container handler 143may remove containers, add them or join them together. Container handler143 may create a modified version of the page which may include changeor removal of components (and of containers in particular), as well asre-rooting of components, e.g. re-assigning a component belonging to acontainer X so it would belong to the parent page or to a differentcontainer Y. Container handler 143 also creates a two-way mappingbetween the original page and the modified page, so that any latercomponent matching performed against the modified layout could becombined with the mapping to create a component matching for theoriginal page.

It will be appreciated that the methods employed by container handler143 described below may be applied to the processing of both the handledcomponent set and layout database 70 (as discussed in more detail hereinbelow). Both the handled component set and layout database may usemultiple methods, and container handler 143 may also implement a method(or a combination thereof) for the handled component set which isdifferent from that implemented for layout database 70.

The following paragraphs discuss each specific method, and then discussunder what conditions and in what ways can these methods be combined orotherwise used together. Reference is now made to FIG. 8 whichillustrates a simple layout showing one container with one text elementand four pictures, and additional text elements and pictures outside ofthe container.

The first method is hierarchical signatures. In this method, containerhandler 143 may retain the hierarchical structure of the container andthis is reflected in the hierarchical signature as described in moredetail herein below. For example, the (string-representation) signaturefor the component set of FIG. 8 may be“1×Container(1×Text,4×Pic),2×Text,2×Pic”.

It will be appreciated that system 100 in general may regard allcontainers types as a single semantic type (e.g. have only one“container( )” keyword). Alternatively, system 100 may support multiplecontainer semantic types, creating signatures such as“1×Gallery(1×Text,2×Pic), 1×Box(2×Text)”.

It will be appreciated that a semantic type tree is a tree of type inwhich similar types are united under a parent node which represents amore abstract type matching any of the sibling types (e.g. “visual” canmatch to both “image” and “video”) as is illustrated in FIG. 9 to whichreference is now made. It will be further appreciated that anabstraction process is a process in which a signature (defined using aseries of types and quantity of object of each type) may be transformedby replacing each type with a more abstract parent type (in reference toa given semantic type tree).

In this scenario, the container types may also be included in thesemantic type tree, and the abstraction process may apply to them aswell.

Container handler 143 may also implement identical sub-tree merging(similar to the use of common sub-expression elimination in compileroptimization technique). In this scenario, a signature of the form“1×Container(1×Text,4×Pic),1×Container(1×Text,4×Pic)” would be foldedinto “2×Container(1×Text,4×Pic)”. Such folding may occur during theabstraction process, as multiple container types (e.g. the “Gallery” and“Box” above) are both abstracted into the higher level type “container”,as is shown in the signature sequence below (using the type hierarchydefined in FIG. 9 ):

Stage Signature Comment 1 1xGallery(1xImage, 2xSingle Initial Line),1xBox configuration (1xImage, 2xMulti Line) 2 1xGallery(1xImage,2xText), Both single and 1xBox (1xImage, 2xText) multi-line convertedinto text 3 2xContainer(1xVisual, Gallery and box 2xNon-visual)converted into generic container, and then folded 42xContainer(3xComponent) Using generic components in container

Container handler 143 may match containers represented in hierarchicalsignatures to containers in the located layout in multiple ways (at theactual component matching stage). For example, a page with twocontainers (A, B) having similar underlying content may be matchedagainst a located template with two containers (C, D) in two ways (A-C,B-D or A-D, B-C).

It should be noted that (as shown in FIG. 9 ) the hierarchy forcontainer components is essentially separated from that of regularcomponents—a container would not be abstracted into a regular component.

Container handler 143 may remove containers (at all levels) so that allcomponents reside directly in the containing page. This requireschanging the x and y coordinates of all fields so that they would berelative to the main page instead of the “flattened” container.Reference is now made to FIG. 10 which illustrates an example ofcontainer flattering. Layout A may be converted into a simplified layoutB, removing multiple containers in the process. Note that somecomponents (marked with ‘a’) may have associated frames which may beretained.

Container handler 143 may match components against layout components ofarbitrary locations, so the general structure (and container hierarchy)of the layout would not be preserved.

Container handler 143 may also flatten containers and search for alayout according to the separate contained components (as in the regularcontainer flattening method described herein above). However, when amatch is found, for each set of components in the located layout whichmatch original layout components from a single container, containerhandler 143 tries to reconstruct a new container which tightly wraps thematching components in the located layout as is represented in FIG. 11to which reference is now made. Original layout A comprises containers a(containing components [b, c, d]), i (containing components [e, f]) andj (containing components [g, h]).

Container handler 143 may perform the flattening phase (I) to create asimplified (flat) layout [B] in which the non-container components [b,c, d, e, f, g, h] all reside at the top page level. Container handler143 may keep a component/container mapping between A and B.

Container handler 143 may then perform a search and component matchingphase (II) in which it locates a layout C which has the matchingcomponents [b′, c′, d′, e′, f′, g′, h′]—which are arranged in adifferent way than the original components in layout B.

Based on the A⇔B mapping and the B⇔C component matching, containerhandler 143 may perform a container reconstruction phase (III) in whichnew containers [i′, j′, a′] are generated to create a modified layout D.For each set of components in C which match a set of components in Bthat was originally in the same container (e.g. the set [b′, c′, d′]which match [b, c, d] originally in container a).

Container handler 143 may create a tightly wrapping rectangle around thecomponents using a minimal enclosing rectangle. Container handler 143may then expand the enclosing rectangle by a given pre-specified margin(possibly modified based on available space, container size, componentsizes, component spacing and other geometrical parameters).

Container handler 143 may create a new container (e.g. a′) which wrapsthe matching components ([b′, c′, d′] (in the example) based on thegenerated rectangle. Thus, container handler 143 may reconstruct avariant or the original structure. Note that as shown in FIG. 11 , thegenerated containers [i′, j′, a′] have different size and positions thanthe original [i, j, a]. Furthermore, in systems which support multiplecontainer types, the specification for layout database 70 layout C mayinclude guidelines for container creation (e.g. container types andother attributes) used when creating the new containers.

Reference is now made to FIG. 12 which illustrates a number of cases inwhich container flattening and reconstruction may be difficult oroutright impossible. In each of the illustrated scenarios, [x′]represents an object (component/container) which is located in asuggested layout and matched to the original object [x] in the handledcomponent set.

In scenario (I), in the original layout A, the original component c wasoutside of the original container d. However, in the matched layout A′the matched component c′ intersects the reconstructed container d′.

In scenario (II), in the original layout A, the original component c wasoutside of the original container d. However, in the matched layout A′the matched component c′ actually overlaps the reconstructed containerd′. It will be appreciated that in spite of this overlap c′ may belogically separated from (and not contained in) d′ so for example if d′is moved c′ will not move with it.

In scenario (III), in the original layout A, the original containers eand f are disjoint. However, in the matched layout A′ the constructedcontainers e′ and f′ intersect.

In scenario (IV), in the original layout A the original containers e andf are disjoint. However, in the matched layout A′ the constructedcontainers e′ and f′ are “mixed”—each of them containing some componentsbelonging to other container as well. In fact, e′ and f may becomealmost identical, or one of them may contain the other.

It will be appreciated that there may be multiple problem casesinvolving different containers, and there may be different problem casesat different containment levels.

Container handler 143 may attempt to resolve the simpler cases (e.g.scenario (I) above) by moving or modifying the size of the container(and its contained components) or the intersecting components. However,not all cases may be resolved, and container handler 143 may be requiredto filter out the un-resolvable cases.

Container handler 143 may apply single component container handling to acontainer with a single contained component—it may be regarded as aninstance of just the contained component, e.g. Container(pic)

pic. This is different from flattening of the single-component container(as described above), since the original contained component is replacedwith a new version having the size of the container in the originallayout (rather than the size of the original contained component).

Container handler 143 may deduct a given margin (fixed parameter orrelative to container size) from the container size after the matchingprocess (as discussed in more detail herein below) to get the size ofthe final matched component.

Reference is now made to FIG. 13 which illustrates single componentcontainer expansion and matching. The handled component set A includes acontainer a with the single picture component b (and also three textfields on the right). Container handler 143 may pre-process A into A′which includes the single (expanded) picture component a′ having thesame size and position as the pervious container a (as well as the 3text fields).

Container handler 143 may then match A′ with the layout B from layoutdatabase 70 which has a larger picture field on the bottom d, as well as3 text fields on the top.

Container handler 143 may then merge the selected layout B and thecontent from A′ are to form the new page C. In page C, container handler143 uses the area e at the lower part of the page, matching the field dfrom page B. However, e is reduced by a given margin so to form thesomewhat smaller picture field f which would contain the picture in a′.

Container handler 143 may also perform dominant type selection. Underthis method, container handler 143 may assign each container(recursively) the dominant component type of the components inside it,and may replace it by a virtual component having the same type.

Container handler 143 may select this dominant type according to (forexample) the type of the largest component, or according to majorityvoting based on total count/area of components of each type. A thresholdmay apply, therefore, for example only, if a text component covers over60% of the container area the container may be declared as a “textcontainer”.

It will be appreciated that dominant type selection is better performedin the semantic type space (which is already somewhat “normalized”) thanin the component type space. Container handler 143 may also use thesemantic tree type mapping, so to go “up the tree” as much as requiredfor a unified container type to emerge.

Thus, referring back to FIG. 13 , assuming the container a is convertedto a virtual picture component (as it contains 4 picture components andjust one text component), the resulting signature may be: “1×Text,4×Pic”

Container handler 143 may typically assign an empty container (or onethat contains only components filtered out during signature extraction)a default type (e.g. visual).

It will be appreciated that when container handler 143 performs thedominant type selection method on the compared layout (handled componentset) side, the matching process may require resizing. Reference is nowmade to FIG. 14 which illustrates single component container expansionand matching—layout A has container [a] which contains a dominantpicture component [b] (as well as non-dominant text components [c,d,e]).

Container handler 143 may convert layout A to the non-hierarchicallayout B which has a single picture component a′. Layout B is matched(as described in more detail herein below) against a selected layoutfrom layout database 70 originated layout C which has the single picturecomponent f matched to a′. It will be appreciated that a′ and f′ havedifferent sizes (and positions).

Container handler 143 may then map the original container a (with itscontained components b,c,d,e) into f to create the container f. It willbe appreciated that these mappings required the resizing of allcomponents contained in a, and in particular b is resized to form thenew picture component g so to preserve the aspect ratio.

It will also be appreciated that not all components may be re-sized atall (such as a Facebook “Like” button or an iframe containing anon-resizable third party application). Also, the width change of a textcomponent may cause a height change so that the aspect ratio cannot bemaintained. Matching using the dominant type selection method requiresthat all components in the container be re-sizeable. Thus, if a singlecomponent inside the container is not re-sizeable, the method cannot beused.

Container handler 143 may also be implemented using recursiveimplementation. This method can be viewed as the opposite of containerflattening. Under this method, container handler 143 may index andhandle container content separately. Thus, container handler 143 may“stop” at container boundaries and may only handle the elements directlyassociated with the top level page. Container handler 143 may analyzethe content of each container separately and signature extractor 147 maygenerate a separate signature. Container handler 143 may thereforeregard a container as yet another component type which can be indexedand matched (including type abstraction between multiple containertypes). Thus, instead of having a single hierarchical signature (as inthe method noted above), signature extractor 147 may generate a tree ofsignatures—one for the top page and one for each container contained init (directly or indirectly).

It will be appreciated that in this manner, container handler 143 maycombine a page design from one layout with container designs from otherlayouts. Reference is now made to FIG. 15 which illustrates layoutconstruction for the recursive application method of container handling.For page A which includes container b, system 100 may suggest the layoutC with the container d. This layout (C) was constructed based on thelayout E of which the structure of internal container e is not a goodmatch for b, replacing the internal layout of e with the internal layoutof the container g which is part of a different layout F. It will beappreciated that the main page design of F is not a good match for A, sosystem 100 cannot suggest F by itself.

Container handler 143 may perform this mixing process in a number ofways, such as by selecting automatically the best option for eachcontainer in each suggested layout (based on a scoring algorithm) or byselecting the top options for each container in each suggested layout byusing a hierarchical user interface where the designer selects a givensuggested layout, and is prompted to select (recursively) an appropriatelayout for each of the containers in the higher-level selected layout.

Container handler 143 may also locate the best combinations by selectingthe top suggested layouts for the main page. For each container in eachof the selected layouts above, container handler 143 may select the topsuggested layouts for the container.

Container handler 143 may also create all possible combinations (eachsuggested page layout with each suggested container layout). It will beappreciated that this number may be large as a single page may havemultiple containers (with multiple suggested layouts for eachcontainer).

Container handler 143 may also rank all possible combinations using thescoring function—ranking the page globally (including the specificcontainer configuration and the internal layouts). Alternatively,container handler 143 may select the top z combinations and display themto the designer for final selection. It will be appreciated that thismethod is highly suitable for multi-page containers, in which acontainer might have numerous possible internal configurations (i.e. foreach possible mini-page).

It will be further appreciated that container handler 143 may alsocombine the methods as described herein above i.e. by using hierarchicalsignatures, container flattening, container flattening andreconstruction, single component container replacement; dominant typeselection or by recursive implementation.

In an alternative embodiment, container handler 143 may use multiplemethods simultaneously. For example, the container handler 143 may usehierarchical signatures as well as container flattening—creatingmultiple sets of signatures for both layout database 70 and the handledcomponent set. It will be appreciated that layout searcher and generator60 may try to use both methods and suggest the best results to the userby combining the results.

Container handler 143 may also mix methods. For example, using containerflattening (with or without reconstruction) on the layout database 70side (on server 15) and dominant type selection on the handled componentset (client 5) side.

Container handler 143 may also combine flattening with recursiveimplementation, so that some containers may be flattened and some may behandled using a recursive implementation. Flattened containers mayinclude (for example): single component containers, containers withhighly dominant type, containers with a given attribute or type,containers with no semantic links or other relationship between theircontained components, containers that have sufficiently simple contentaccording to a predefined complexity metric.

In general, system 100 may match either a flat handled component setsignature to flat layout database signatures, or a hierarchical handledcomponent set signature to a hierarchical layout database signature.

It will be appreciated that the main factors to be considered by system100 when selecting a single method may include, the importance of thecontainer structure to the designer and how much the designer would liketo preserve the container structure (e.g. based on knowledge of theuser, the profile of the user, the pattern of system use etc.), thelevel of recall (the use of a hierarchical signatures provides for moreexact matches, but lower recall, i.e. less retrieved results) and thequality of the located layouts—as system 100 may use multiple methodsand select the best results located.

It will be appreciated that container handler 143 may also adaptcontainer flattening to a method whereby the layout may be flattened andthe specific atomic component may be used to construct and automaticallygenerated layout as described in more detail herein below.

It will be further appreciated that container handler 143 may adaptrecursive implementation to handle containers as yet another rectangularcomponent to be arranged in lines, along a curve, in columns etc.Container handler 143 may also create additional automatically generatedlayouts (as described in more detail herein below) by re-arrangingcomponents inside the container.

Component splitter 144 may detect and implement component splitting,e.g. based on the content of the relevant component in order to providebetter coverage (i.e. the ability to find matching layouts). This may bedone, for example, when a text component contains a clearly separatedheading and body text—which are separated into two text components. Thismay also be done when a text component contains multiple and clearlyseparate text paragraphs such as is illustrated in FIG. 16 to whichreference is now made. Such splitting may allow matching the layout [A]containing the text component [a] with three distinct text paragraphs([a1], [a2] and [a3]) into the layout [B] (as described in more detailherein below). The picture [c] would be matched into the picture [d],and the tree paragraphs ([a1], [a2] and [a3]) would be mapped into thethree separate text components [b1], [b2] and [b3].

Component splitter 144 may create a “should be near to each other” (or a“do not place an interfering component in the middle”) semanticrelationship between the two created components. Such a semanticrelationship may be used during the matching process (when creatingpossible matching) or by layout filter and ranker 45 (to filter out lessdesirable matches) as described in more detail herein below).

Component filter 145 may filter out some components for signatureextraction (as described in more detail herein below in relation tosignature extractor 147). This may be based on components which are toosmall (i.e. below a certain area/size threshold), specific componenttypes which are always ignored (e.g. decoration components), specificcomponents marked to be ignored by the designer of the page (e.g. lockedcomponents), specific components marked to be ignored in the template(s)underlying the page or may be based on semantic/content analysis of thecomponent (as further described in US Patent Publication No.2015/0074516), which may recognize (for example) pictures which serve asbackground decoration only, or text field containing ASCII graphicscontent (e.g. a separator line created using “ ” or “ ”). In such cases,these components are ignored by signature extractor 147 and duringmatching and adaptation as discussed in more detail herein below.

Component merger 146 may unite different components for the purpose oflayout processing and for signature extraction by signature extractor147 (as described in more detail herein below) in a number of differentways in order to provide better coverage for system 100. It may replacethe components (in a copy of the original layout) with a single virtualcomponent. Component merger 146 may also retain the connection betweenthe new virtual component and the multiple components it replaced.Alternatively, semantic link handler 141 may create a semantic linkstructure involving all of the related components, and manage these inparallel with the extracted signatures. It will be appreciated thatsemantic linking and component merging are related but not identicalconcepts. Semantic link handler 141 may define two separate componentswhich are related (but are not merged for the handled component set).For example, two components which had a dynamic layout anchor betweenthem, but are not adjacent to each other or otherwise semanticallyrelated. Component merger 146 actually replaces two (or more) componentsin the page by a single component in the creation of the handledcomponent set, retaining a link to the original (separate) components.

Component merger 146 may provide multiple optional methods to unitecomponents, which are activated based on user settings or on thespecific parameters of the layouts involved. These may include any ofthe methods detailed below.

Component merger 146 may merge components which are highly overlapping(e.g. above a given percentage of their area) into a single component,using the smallest enclosing rectangle as the new component size andposition. The component type is determined based on the dominantcomponent types, as described below for container type determination.

Component merger 146 may merge adjacent components which have identicalor similar type. One example is image stitching—component merger 146 maystitch image components which are adjacent (horizontally or vertically)into a single image component for the purpose of analysis. This maydepend on the size and distance of the components. It may also depend onanalysis of the content of the image component (e.g. having similarcolors, patterns or features at the touching edge). Another case is textstitching—similar to image stitching as noted above. This may berelevant only to text component which are vertically (rather thanhorizontally) adjacent, as there is no good way to merge the textcontent of two side-by-side components.

Component merger 146 may employ semantic analysis to detect relatedcomponents, such as an image and its caption field. Such components areleft separate, but component merger 146 may create a “should be near toeach other” semantic relationship between the two (alternative layoutsare still applicable in such cases, e.g. replace a layout of “captionsbelow images” with one of “captions above images”).

An additional scenario is having a set of components which togetheremulate a gallery. For example, a set of 9 image components arranged ina 3×3 form may not be suitable for stitching, e.g. due to the distancebetween adjacent images being too large. Instead, component merger 146may convert the arrangement into a 3×3 image gallery component.

Signature extractor 147 may extract a semantic signature representinglayouts generated on the incoming page and/or layout (both handledcomponent sets and stored layouts) and may perform searching andcomparisons using these signatures. It will be appreciated thatsignature 147 may use information retrieved by the other elements ofpage analyzer 44 as described herein above.

Signature extractor 147 may initially map components to semantic typesarranged in a semantic tree such as is illustrated in FIG. 17 to whichreference is now made. The mapping is usually 1-to-1 mapping, i.e. thereis a single atomic semantic type in the tree for each component type.However, in some cases multiple component types may map to a singlesemantic type, e.g. multiple gallery component types may map to a singleGallery semantic type. It will be appreciated that in someimplementations, slider galleries (typically wider on the x-axis andshorter on the y-axis) may map to a different SliderGallery semantictype notes used for other 2-dimensional galleries.

Atomic semantic types are placed in the tree as descendants of compositesemantic type, as Image and Video are descendants of Visual in thesample tree of FIG. 17 . The tree may include multiple levels ofcomposite semantic types and atomic nodes may reside at differentdistances from the root of the tree. The top level composite semantictype is the generic semantic type component. It will be appreciated thatsemantic types which are higher in the tree can be said to be moreabstract, or having a higher abstraction level.

It will be also appreciated that a regular semantic type (which maps oneor more website building system component types) may also havesub-types. These sub-types map specific sub-classes of the given websitebuilding system component type(s), and thus provide a finer resolutionthan the one provided by the website building system type system. Thesub-types are called semantic sub-types and are represented as nodes inthe semantic tree below the regular semantic types. It will beappreciated that this is required as in some scenarios a component typemay need to be referred to as two different types, since those twosubtypes are semantically different. For example, a page with twoparagraphs may get different layout suggestions than a page with oneparagraph and one title, although in both scenarios this is a page withtwo text components.

For example, signature extractor 147 may map regular text componentsinto the text semantic type (there could be multiple text componenttypes). However, signature extractor 147 may also include two semanticsub-types, title and paragraph, which map text components whose contentwas identified as title or paragraph.

Signature extractor 147 may arrange the title and paragraph as atomicsub-types of a composite Text semantic type as show in the semantic treesection illustrated in FIG. 18 to which reference is now made.

It will be appreciated that components may still be mapped directly intothe composite semantic type (text) instead of the atomic semantic types(title, paragraph), e.g. if signature extractor 147 cannot identify themas title of paragraph text.

For example, a page contains 6 text components, of which: 1 isidentified as title; 3 are identified as paragraph and 2 are identifiedas generic text (i.e. neither a title nor a paragraph). In thisscenario, the generated signature would be “Title-1-Paragraph-3-Text-2”instead of “Text-6”.

Signature extractor 147 may divide semantic types into sub-types basedon visual component properties, such as general size categories (smallvs. large), height/width ratios, bright vs. dark components etc. Forexample, images may be divided into narrow, tall or square categories.Such sub-typing may be applied to specific semantic types only or acrossall semantic types, e.g. signature extractor 147 may define differentsub-types for images based on aspect ratio categories, but not forvideos (which have specific possible aspect ratios). Sub-typing may alsobe inferred from other parameters and attributes, including non-visualattribute, such as using the content of the component (e.g. using textor image analysis, face recognition, image feature extraction etc.) andusing additional website building system information, includingprocedural directives related to the component, its use pattern orbehavior. For example, all texts components which are defined as “hiddenand appear when a button titled “help” is pressed” may be defined as a“help text” semantic sub-type of the “text” type.

It will be appreciated that the use of highly detailed semanticsub-types might yield non-optimal results, since the suggested layoutsmay turn out to be too similar to the handled component set, and thelayout recall would also be much lower.

The semantic tree may also include multi-component semantic types (asdescribed below), i.e. semantic types representing a set of semanticallylinked components. The set of semantically-linked components representedby a multi-component semantic type is counted as a single component,even though it contains two or more actual components.

One scenario is the mapping of plug-in components, such as third partyapplications. Signature extractor 147 may (for example) map suchcomponents to multiple atomic semantic types based on the general classof the third party application (e.g. e-shop third party applications,blog third party applications etc.). These multiple third partyapplication semantic types may then be united under a generic thirdparty application composite semantic type.

Third party application semantic types may also have additional,finer-grain information used for later selection of matching third partyapplications, or for signature distance calculation between pagescontaining third party applications. Such information may include, forexample, specific interfaces or data requirements of a specific thirdparty application. This can be used, for example, so to provide a higherscore for matching third party applications which use the sameinterfaces as the current third party application, and minimize the needfor a third party application protocol translation (such as discussed inUS Patent Publication No US-2014-0229821 entitled “Third PartyApplication Communication API” published 14 Aug. 2014, incorporatedherein by reference and assigned to the common assignee of the currentinvention). It will also be appreciated that third party applicationsmay occupy multiple windows or regions in the applications created bythe WBS, and still be handled as a single semantic type (e.g. such asdescribed in US Patent Publication No US-2014-0229821).

For a given layout (from an indexed page or handled component set),signature extractor 147 may generate a signature which represents thecount of components of each semantic type in the layout. The signaturecan be represented in multiple ways such as:

A string representation, e.g. “3×Text,4×Visual, 1×Gallery” or“Text-3-Visual-4-Gallery-1” and vector representation, e.g.[[3,Text],[4,Visual],[1,Gallery]].

It will be appreciated that multi-component semantic types actuallyrepresent multiple semantically-linked components as one component inthe count. As signature extractor 147 arranges semantic types in asemantic tree, a given layout may be referred to with different levelsof abstractions (i.e. using different-level semantic type), andsignature extractor 147 may generate multiple signatures for eachlayout.

For example, for a layout with 1 text, 1 video, 1 image and 1 gallery,signature extractor 147 may generate the following signatures (assumingthe use of a GenericVisual composite type):

1 Text, 1 Video, 1 Image, 1 Gallery.

1 Text, 2 Visuals, 1 Gallery.

1 Text, 3 GenericVisual.

4 components.

Signature extractor 147 may therefore generate multiple signatures forboth the handled component set and the indexed pages, and the searchingprocess (as discussed in more detail herein below) may include some orall of these signatures.

It will be appreciated that there may be multiple ways for signatureextractor 147 to derive more abstract signatures from a given signature,as it could go up the semantic tree in different orders. For example,referring to the example semantic tree, and assuming the basic signature“1 Image, 1 Video, 1 Single line text, 1 multi line text”, two signaturesets could be generated. The first signature set may be:

1 Image, 1 Video, 1 Single line text, 1 Multi line text.

2 Visual, 1 Single line text, 1 Multi line text.

2 Visual, 2 Text.

4 Components.

The second signature set would be:

1 Image, 1 Video, 1 Single line text, 1 Multi line text.

1 Image, 1 Video, 2 Text.

2 Visual, 2 Text.

4 Components.

In the first option signature extractor 147 starts by “uniting” imageand video together. In the second option, it starts by “uniting” singleline text and multi-line text together.

Alternatively, signature extractor 147 may use a stratified semantictree as illustrated in FIG. 19 to which reference is now made, whichshows a stratified version of the semantic tree shown in FIG. 17 . In astratified system, all semantic types “go up the tree” together. Thus,all level 1 (bottom of tree) semantic type entries are united into theirlevel 2 semantic types together, and then level 3 etc. A typicalsignature set would be:

1 Image, 1 Video, 1 Single line text, 1 Multi line text.

2 Visual, 2 Text.

4 Components.

Signature extractor 147 may support a stratified semantic tree which hasmultiple node levels inside a single strata, and possibly even have leafnodes inside the non-bottom strata. Reference is now made to FIG. 20which illustrates a stratified semantic tree with paths of differentlength in the same strata. It will be appreciated that the button typeis in the 2^(nd) strata and the text types have two node levels insidethe 2^(nd) strata, unlike the image and video types.

The image type has two semantic sub-types in level 1, and the video (orothers) do not. In this scenario, signature extractor 147 may typicallyadvance all components inside the lowest strata until they reach the topof their strata, and then “move them together” to the higher strata.

An example type uniting progression (and the list of generatedsignatures) may include:

Stage Signature Comment 1 1xWide Image, 1xImage, Initial 1xVideo,1xSingle Line, configuration 1xMulti Line, 1xButton 2 2xImage, 1xVideo,Now all 1xSingle Line, level 1 1xMulti Line, 1xButton components are atthe “top of level 1” 3 3xVisual, 2xText, Now all 1xButton componentshave crossed over to level 2 4 3xVisual, 3xNon-visual Now all componentsare at the “top of level 2” 5 6xComponent Now all components havecrossed over to level 3

As a general rule, going up the tree to a higher abstraction level maylead to increased recall, at the expense of reduced precision. The lessabstract the signature is (lower in the tree), the more precise thelayout is, i.e. closer to the original component collection.

It will be appreciated that for a page retrieved by spider 41, pageanalyzer 44 may generate a single full page layout, multiple partialpage layouts (created by removing the least important components one byone) and multiple segmented layouts together with their associatedsignatures for each type of layout. The set of possible partial andsegment signatures are later used by layout searcher and generator 60 totry to find matching partial layouts and/or find matching segmentlayouts (and to complete them).

It will be further appreciated that as well as layouts and associatedsignatures, page analyzer 44 may also produce an associated layoutpackage for each layout (full page, partial page or segmented). Eachassociated layout package may contain: the full page data of theoriginal page (including component content), the handled componentset—which components in the page should be handled, the extracted layoutand the associated signature for the layout (which could be multiplesignatures, e.g. if calculating signatures for multiple abstractionlevels). Each associated layout package may also contain informationincluding indications of component relevance status (background,decoration, filtered out etc.) component split/merge information, pagetype indication, container split/merge/modification information andsemantic link information—for use when matching linked components in ahandled component set (a query page) and layout database 70 as discussedin more detail herein below. The associated layout package may alsoinclude a screen shot of the original page, so to present to the user a“full view” of the suggested layouts, and not just an abstract layoutview. Layout database 70 may also store a pre-processed version of thelayout suitable for quick generation of a preview of the suggestedlayouts with the user content.

It will also be appreciated that since layout packages are oftengenerated in groups (e.g. due to full page, partial page and segmentprocessing), multiple layout packages may share blocks of information(e.g. the original page information).

Layout database 75 may avoid storing some of the information above, andinstead recalculate it from the full page (from the pertinent layoutpackage) when needed.

Once page analyzer 44 has processed the incoming page into suitablelayouts and has extracted the associated signatures, layout filter andranker 45 may check the visual quality of the layouts and/or pages inorder to ensure that only the layouts and/or pages which have theappropriate quality and diversity are included.

Layout filter and ranker 45 may then index these selected layouts and/orpages accordingly before storing them in layout database 70 via layoutdatabase handler 75. It will be appreciated that after the matchingprocess (as described in more detail herein below) layout filter andranker 45 may also receive matched candidate layouts to ensure that aquality and diverse set of candidate alternative layouts are eventuallypresented to the user as described in more detail herein below.

Reference is now made to FIG. 21 which illustrates the elements oflayout filter and ranker 45. Layout filter and ranker 45 may furthercomprise a visual page comparer 46, a layout quality rater 47, a ranker48 and a diversifier 49. Page spider 41 may provide pages from whichlayouts may be generated. It will be appreciated that the extractedlayout may be known as a server based layout (as opposed to anautomatically generated layout).

Visual page comparer 46 may determine the level of visual similarity oftwo layouts or of two pages (e.g. between a new incoming layout and alayout already stored in layout database 70). It will be appreciatedthat it is not used to retrieve pages when collecting pages and layoutsfor indexing, but instead is used to filter out pages and/or layoutswhich are very visually similar to other pages and/or layouts in layoutdatabase 70 having the same signature—so to better support resultsdiversification.

Visual page comparer 46 may compare the general component distributionin the two pages, e.g. using detailed text/image/overall metrics. It maydivide the page into regions (e.g. using a grid), check which componentsintersect which region (possibly classifying by color, type etc.) andcompare the scores for the various regions.

Visual page comparer 46 may also compare by attempted component matchingbetween the pages, e.g. by attempting to match the components andchecking how good the resulting match is. This could be done, forexample, by matching components in the two pages by position, size andvisual similarity (e.g. based shape and color).

Visual page comparer 46 may match the two pages (for example) bycreating the set of all possible matching (possibly filtering totallyirrelevant matches), scoring them and finding the match with the bestscore, by using a greedy algorithm to always add the best next pair orby handling the problem as an assignment problem and solving it usingknown algorithms such as the Hungarian algorithm.

Visual page comparer 46 may also use snapshot similarity at the pageimage level, by using a known image similarity algorithm on a virtualsnapshot of the two pages.

Layout quality rater 47 may provide a quality score (as discussed inmore detail herein below) which may be used when indexing to filter outlow-quality pages or when retrieving to rank the pages displayed to theuser.

The score may be typically stored with the indexed layout in layoutdatabase 70. However, layout quality rater 47 may recalculate the scoreupon use as the calculation may be based on an expert system that iscontinuously modified, or may use the post-adaptation version of asuggested layout (i.e. the version created by adapting the handledcomponent set to the specific suggested layout), or may depend onquality criteria specific to the given user.

Layout quality rater 47 may apply this algorithm to full pages andpartial pages as well as templates for full pages and page parts. Layoutquality rater 47 may take into account components and visual elementswhich are filtered out by component filter 145 (such as decorationswhich are not regular components).

Layout quality rater 47 may use a number of methods or a combinationthereof to determine the rating such as methods which are based on astatic analysis of the content of the page, methods which rely ontraining a learning system (or systems) based on actual selections madeby users or methods which are based on information related to thedesigner of the page.

Layout quality rater 47 may support multiple types of quality scores andmetrics. For example, the article by Xianjun Sam Zheng, IshaniChakraborty, James Jeng-Weei Lin, and Robert Rauschenberger “Correlatinglow-level image statistics with users-rapid aesthetic and affectivejudgments of web pages”, International Conference on Human factors inComputing Systems (SIGCHI), April, 2009.http://research.rutgers.edu/˜ishanic/papers/sigchi.pdf, has end-usersperceive multiple quality metrics (e.g. professional-looking,captivating, and appealing) as different and independent metrics.

It will be appreciated that there are a number of known algorithms inthe art for such ranking though they are typically applied to regularweb pages and not to component collections. An algorithm may be based onany combination of the following:

Page statistical metrics. These view and analyze the page as acollection of components, and extract metrics such as #of textcomponents, #of fonts used, #and types of links etc. Layout qualityrater 47 may use the statistical profile of pages known to bewell-designed (e.g. created by a professional studio inside the WBSvendor), and compare the statistical profile of the page to that ofwell-designed pages.

Page visual attributes (as discussed herein above in relation to thearticle by Zheng et al.). Layout quality rater 47 may analyze the pageas an image, collecting metrics such as symmetry, balance, number ofquadrants in decomposition, color uniformity etc. The metrics should becombined by pre-determined weights to derive a total page quality score.

Layout quality rater 47 may also use a content-based algorithm in whichthe parameters are set by a learning system (such as a neural network)trained with actual user inputs—herein referred to as a layout qualityrater learning system. Layout quality rater 47 may use a number ofactual user inputs so to train the layout quality rater learning systemsuch as which layouts were actually selected by users and applied to apage, which layouts were tested by a user, applied to a page and laterdiscarded or replaced and a specific feedback requested from the user(e.g. “rate the best 3 of the displayed layouts.”).

Layout quality rater 47 may also use actual page viewing/ratinginformation to train the layout quality rater learning system. However,such rating may be unreliable—as it may be greatly affected, forexample, by advertising campaigns which affects site traffic (but is notrelated to the design quality of the site).

Layout quality rater 47 may employ a system-wide set of weights—i.e.using a single layout quality rater learning system which provides asystem-wide layout quality rate value (used by all designers and storedtogether with the stored layouts). Alternatively, it may use apersonalized layout quality rater learning system which may have weightspersonalized to the specific user (or user set). In the latter case, thepersonalized layout quality rater learning system may be initialized byvalues from a system-wide layout quality rater learning system. Then thepersonalized layout quality rater learning system would be furthertrained by the specific user (or user set). The layout quality raterlearning system would gradually come to reflect the personal taste ofthe specific user (or user set).

In the scenario in which a personalized layout quality rater learningsystem is employed, layout quality rater 47 may use separate layoutquality rater learning system activation to grade the results since itcannot use the stored layout quality rated values which may besystem-wide (rather than personalized).

Layout quality rater 47 may also rank pages according to informationabout the designer of the pages. This could a generic designer ranking,or a specific rating, such as a designers rating specific to the givenindustry or sector to which the user belongs.

Ranker 48 may rank according to the semantic similarity to the handledcomponent set signature, the layout quality rating value produced bylayout quality rater 47 and parameters external to the layout, such aslayout designer identity (e.g. the page designer has provided a list ofdesigner whose style he prefers) and commercial parameters such aspromoted search priority increase (if implemented).

Ranker 48 may disqualify some of the solutions based on semanticsimilarity. Low semantic similarity results should have been filteredout at the retrieval stage, but the resulting layouts may still have arange of semantic similarity values. It may also disqualify solutionswith low layout quality rate values, which may have passed the filteringprocess at the layout database 70 creation stage.

It will be appreciated that if a personalized layout quality rate valuesystem has been implemented, layout quality rater 47 may calculate thespecific personalized layout quality rate values for all matches basedon the parameters specific to the user who performed the query.

Ranker 48 may disqualify some of the solutions based on component sizematching. Ranker 48 may perform preliminary matching of components(based on semantic types) between each resulting pages and the handledcomponent set as described in more detail below in relation to layoutadapter and applier 50. It will be appreciated that in some cases, theremay be a semantic match between the types of components but asubstantial mismatch in the sizes of the components.

An example would be a scenario, in which both the handled component setand a located page P have 5 text components, but the text components ofthe handled component set are large and all the text components of pageP are all very small. In such a scenario, it is best to disqualify pageP.

Ranker 48 may provide a preliminary ranking by sorting the resultinglayouts according to any combination of the metrics above (e.g. aweighted average).

As discussed herein above, system 100 aims at providing a diverse set ofhigh quality layouts. When operating within layout searcher andgenerator 60, diversifier 49 may ensure that there is enough diversitybetween the retrieved or generated layouts for a particular page andthat the layouts are as visually different as possible. When processinglayouts generated from page spider 41 retrieved web-pages, diversifier49 may ensure that there is enough diversity among the potential layoutsto be added to layout database 70—both among the potential layouts andthemselves, and between the potential layouts and these already existingin layout database 70.

Once the criteria above are used to create the preliminary ranking,diversifier 49 may create a final (displayed) result ranking using adiversification process. The diversification process may be based on thevisual distance calculated by visual page comparer 46 as describedherein above, and the selection of results which are not visuallysimilar. Diversifier 49 aims to present suggested layouts which arevisually different from the handled component set and from each other.

Diversifier 49 may do this using a greedy algorithm. A typical greedyalgorithm works as follows:

Define the following page/layout metrics:

SLS(L1,L2)—semantic layout similarity between layouts L1 and L2.

LQR(L)—layout quality rating of a layout L (which may be user-specific).

VPS(L1,L2)—visual page similarity between layouts L1 and L2 (usingvisual page comparer 46).

Let S be the matching layouts found by the semantic query, e.g. the topn pages P having the maximal SLS(HCS,P);

Define an initially empty result R;

Select a page P from S having highest value of a metric using acombination of SLS(HCS,P) and LQR(P);

Add the found page P to R and remove it from S;

Repeat the following until R is sufficiently large:

Select a page P from S which has the highest value of a metric that is acombination of:

SLS(HCS,P), i.e. semantically close to the HCS;

LQR(P), i.e. having high quality;

${- \left( {\sum\limits_{{PP} \in R}{{VPS}\left( {{PP},P} \right)}} \right)},$

i.e. having maximal total amount of visual distance between P and theexisting members of the result set.

Add P to R and remove it from S;

It will be appreciated that numerous variations to the basic greedyalgorithm exist (for example the article by Vieira, Razente, Barioni,Hadjieleftheriou, Srivastava, Traina, Tsotras—2011 “On query resultdiversification”http://www.csd.uoc.gr/˜hy562/papers/diversification/vieirall.pdf) suchas:

Creating initial clustering of the pages in S according to visualsimilarity, and selecting one example from each cluster.

Checking visual distance of selected page P from both current resultpages as well as pages in S (so to select pages which provide diversityfor upcoming selections as well).

Using randomized selection among k best alternatives at each round.

Once the final ranked result set R is created, ranker 48 may display itto the designer so the designer may select which layout to apply to thehandled component set as described in more detail herein below.

Once ranker 48 and diversifier 49 have ranked the layouts and ensuredthat they are diverse, layout filter and ranker 45 may send them tolayout database coordinator 75 which may store them in layout database70 accordingly indexed.

As discussed herein above, layout searcher and generator 60 may searchlayout database 70 to find suitable semantically similar layouts tooffer to a user as an alternative to his requested page, and alsogenerate automatically generated layouts (as described in more detailherein below) which correspond to the handled component set of his page.It will be appreciated that not only may a user transfer all his contentto a new layout, he may also make edits during the process, e.g. invokethe system to display a set of layout alternatives (in a pop-up dialogfor example), and then continue to edit the page while the pop up dialogis open and refreshes to display changing alternative layouts.

Reference is now made to FIG. 22 which illustrates the elements oflayout searcher and generator 60. Layout searcher and generator 60 mayfurther comprise an automatically generated layout (AGL) handler 62, aserver based layout (SBL) handler 64 and a matcher 66. The functioningof these elements is discussed in more detail herein below.

Layout searcher and generator 60 may receive a request input page viapage editor 30 and page analyzer 44, for which a user would like to seealternative layouts. As discussed herein above, page editor 30 may be asuitable graphical user interface between the user and system 100 andmay also allow users to make editorial changes to their page (bothcontent and format). Page editor 30 may allow the user to mark eitherall the components in the page for which he wants an alternative layoutor just a subset. The incoming request page and associated handledcomponent set may be analyzed by page analyzer 44 (as described hereinabove) which may break up the full incoming handled component set intopartial and segmented handled component sets and may generate associatedsignatures and layout packages as described in more detail herein belowto extract 3 different sets of potential handled component sets from theuser requested page—full, partial and segmented.

The output of page analyzer 44 (handled component sets, signatures,layout package etc.) may then be passed to both AGL handler 62 and SBLhandler 64 to create/retrieve appropriate candidate layouts. Matcher 66may check candidate layouts from SBL handler 64 and AGL handler 62against the handled component set of the incoming page and may find asubset of matching components between the two layouts (as discussed inmore detail herein below). Layout filter and ranker 45 may filter andrank the retrieved candidate layouts as described herein above and mayforward them to layout adapter and applier 50 to be adapted accordinglyas described in more detail herein below. It will be appreciated thatmatcher 66 may require a precise match between a pair of layouts ratherthan a match of a subset of the components.

It will be appreciated, that in addition to layouts created and preparedfor use, and those generated from existing websites by page analyzer 44,AGL handler 62 may create automatically generated layouts based on thecomponents included in the handled component set of the incoming page.

These automatically generated layouts may be used as a fallback (if nosuitable, high-quality layout was found by searching as described inmore detail herein below), or may be created by default (so to produceone or more additional layouts to be ranked and displayed to the user).

Reference is now made to FIG. 23 which illustrates the elements of AGLhandler 62. AGL handler 62 may further comprise an AGL coordinator 261,a column layout generator 262, a main and side bar layout generator 263and a rule based generator 264.

AGL coordinator 261 may receive the incoming handled component set fromeither page editor 30 or from SBL handler 64 (as described in moredetail herein below), and create multiple possiblealgorithmically-generated layouts which use these components, possiblytaking into account various constraints and considerations as detailedbelow. Column layout generator 262 may divide the page into columns andorder the components in one column after the other. Main and side barlayout generator 263 may place components in a larger main column andafter that in a smaller side-bar and rule based layout generator 264 mayplace components one after the other according to pre-defined placementrules which may include specific layout guidelines for specificcomponent types. AGL handler 62 may also combine the various layoutgenerator methods, e.g. by using one method for the main generatedlayout and a different method for container layout generation.

AGL handler 62 may be applied to single components or to componentsgrouped according to semantic relationship (as further discussed USPatent Publication No. 2015/0074516).

AGL handler 62 may also take into account existing explicit dynamiclayout anchors (as per US Patent Publication No 2013-0219263) and groupelements anchored together as a single meta-component to be placed asone entity in the automatically generated layout order. It may also takeinto account the existing component order (e.g. using the componentorder extraction algorithms described in US Patent Publication No.2015/0074516), so the created automatically generated layouts are morerelated to the original layout. Note that this is different from thesignature extraction performed for layout database 70 searching, wherethe current page layout is irrelevant (except for the arrangement ofcontainers).

It will be appreciated that no signature extraction is required for anautomatically generated layout, since they are based on the actualcomponent set of the handled component set, and are thus expected tohave a “perfect score” as far as component matching is concerned.However, they might fail in terms of diversity (i.e. they are toosimilar to another suggested layout) or quality (i.e. they are not asvisually appealing as other suggested layouts). The output of AGLhandler 62 may be sent to matcher 66 or returned to SBL handler 64 asdescribed in more detail herein below.

Reference is now made to FIG. 24 which illustrates the elements of SBLhandler 64. SBL handler 64 may comprise a server based layoutcoordinator (SBL) handler 161, a partial layout handler 162 and asegment layout handler 163.

As discussed herein above, page analyzer 44 (and the signature extractor147 in particular) may produce an array of signatures. These can bedivided into 3 signature classes—full page, partial page and segment.

Full page signatures may be used to find layouts in layout database 70having a set of components which match the entire page (or handledcomponent set).

Partial page signatures may be used to find the closest matching layoutfor a subset of the components, and to add the missing ones. In order toavoid combinatorial complexity (i.e. having to create signatures for allpossible component sub-groups), signature extractor 147 may remove justthe “least important component” (according to an importance rank) one ata time, and may create a signature after each single component removal.For example, a Facebook like component is less important than a primaryimage component.

Signature extractor 147 may also create the effect of adding components(to create “larger” signatures for searching). This can be done byremoving components (in a similar way—according to importance) in thecollection stage, and creating a set of possible signatures for eachindexed layout. This way gathered layouts may be indexed by layoutcollector and updater 40 under multiple signatures according to theirfull and partial layouts, and matcher 66 may match a handled componentset against a part of a gathered layout (as discussed in more detailherein below).

Segment page signatures may be used to divide the handled component setinto segments, in order to find a match for each segment and combine theresulting matches.

SBL coordinator 161 may receive the incoming page request from pageanalyzer 44 together with the handled component set and the list ofsignatures for the three different categories (full page, partial pageand segment). SBL coordinator 161 may then query layout database 70using the signature list via layout database coordinator 75.

As discussed herein above, layout database coordinator 75 may comprise asignature comparer 77. Signature comparer 77 may compare the extractedsignatures from the handled component set of the incoming page requestwith the stored indexed signatures in layout database 70. Signaturecomparer 77 may support exact searching only. Exact searching simplysearches for layout having the same signature—which might provideexcellent precision but very low recall. Approximate searching, on theother hand, requires finding layouts whose signatures are close to thatof the handled component set.

It will be further appreciated that signature comparer 77 may onlyperform semantic abstraction i.e. may attempt to compare signatures in anumber of different ways by performing semantic abstraction on bothsignatures being compared. For example, when comparing a “heading text”signature to a “paragraph text” signature, it may abstract bothsignatures into “text component” resulting in a match. It will beappreciated that signature comparer 77 may perform abstraction at thecompare time or by indexing each signature with its multiple abstractionalternatives in advance and then may search according to thesealternatives. Thus, each stored layout is indexed under multiplesignatures (at various levels of abstraction). It will be furtherappreciated that signature comparer 77 does not handle extra or missingcomponents.

It will be appreciated that signature similarity may be defined based ona distance metric—how different are two signatures. Signature comparer77 may employ a number of possible metrics, possibly based on a weightedsemantic tree.

It will be appreciated that some of the metrics may employ a weightedsemantic tree which includes a weight for each tree arc, as illustratedin FIG. 25 to which reference is now made. The arc weight (a positivenumber) for each arc states the distance from the original designerintent by going up or down the arc.

In the example illustrated in FIG. 25 to which reference is now made, a(Single line=>Text) arc has a weight of 5 whereas a (Multi line=>Text)arc has a weight of 2. These values may be selected for use by signaturecomparer 77 since a multi-line text component more closely resembles thetraditional notion of a text component than a single-line textcomponent.

Such arc weights may be determined in multiple ways. For example, theymay be determined by the system designers, may be inferred fromresponses from page designers using the system, may be inferred fromsystem usage information or may be derived using a learning system basedon user behavior and responses.

One possible metric may be based on the difference in the amount of eachsemantic type. If signature is considered a vector with a positiveinteger value (>=0) for each semantic type (whose value is the amount ofcomponents of the given type), signature comparer 77 may define a set Sof all semantic types (including both atomic and composite types), thedifference d between signatures A[ ] and B[ ] is:

$d = {\sum\limits_{t \in S}{❘{{A\lbrack t\rbrack} - {B\lbrack t\rbrack}}❘}}$

In the calculation above, amounts for composite types are only forcomponents directly assigned to the specific composite type (by mappingfrom component type), i.e. not components mapped into sub-types whichwere later abstracted into the composite type.

Another possible metric is the sum of weights for all arcs that have tobe traversed to make the signatures identical (multiplying each weightby the number of components of the given semantic types that have to gothrough these arcs). This assumes that the tree is traversed both up anddown. An example of this is the use of the tree in FIG. 25 to whichreference is now made, in order to calculate the distance between:

A=[Image 5 Video 6]

And

B=[Image 3 Video 8]

To go (for example) from A to B, the following arcs may be traversed:

2×(Images=>Visual)=2*3;

2×(Visual=>Video)=2*5;

For a total cost of 16 (2*3+2*5).

The tree should be extended to contain “extra component” node attachedto the top level “component” node so to support additional or missingnodes as shown in FIG. 26 to which reference is now made.

It will be appreciated that as the semantic tree has a single path fromeach type to each type, the tree traversal “direction” does not affectthe result.

Signature comparer 77 may make the two metrics above area-sensitive bytrying to match components (having the same semantic type) according totheir areas, and applying the area of “left over” components as amultiplier to the cost of “left over” components for each A and B. Thus,only components having similar area are equivalent, and components whosearea is too small or too large are regarded as “extra”.

Typically, the best quality layouts that may be stored in layoutdatabase 70 are manually created layouts, followed by the layouts basedon website building system internal designer web sites, followed by thatof the external designers (at differing levels). It will be appreciatedthat layout database 70 may also store automatically generated layouts(based on the components in the handled component set) at differinglevels of quality—as some component combinations lend themselves to thecreation of better automatically generated layouts than others. This maybe required if system 100 includes a sophisticated system forautomatically generated layouts including (for example) an elaborateaesthetic rule system. It will be appreciated that in such a system, thecreation of automatically generated layouts may be resourceintensive—since generated layouts differ based on the order of thecomponents, the amount of automatically generated layouts is exponentialto the number of components. Therefore, it may be desirable topre-generate automatically generated layouts for multiple possiblesignatures and to store them in layout database 70. In such a systemlayout database searching by SBL handler 64 may find these layouts andSBL handler 64 may include them in the search results together withactual layouts that have been generated from designed pages by pageanalyzer 44 as described herein above.

Thus, in an alternative embodiment, AGL handler 62 may be invoked by SBLhandler 64 after SBL handler 64 has finished retrieving candidatelayouts only.

In another embodiment, system 100 may have a well-defined criterionwhich states for which signatures automatically generated layouts werepre-generated. Thus, AGL handler 62 may be invoked only if the requiredsignatures do not comply with the criterion.

In yet another embodiment, system 100 may omit AGL handler altogether.

To combine the searching in these multiple layout databases 70,signature comparer 77 may use either a combined search—i.e. may searchall of the layout databases 70 and may combine the results (takingdiversity and quality into account when ranking the results) or mayperform a sequential search—search the layout databases 70 according toa pre-specified order. It may search the next layout databases 70 if theresults from the previous layout databases 70 are not sufficient (interms of number of results, their quality or their diversity).

It will be appreciated that there are multiple ways in which thesignature comparer 77 can perform the search so to locate suitablecandidate layouts. It may search for identical signatures, search forsimilar signatures through semantic abstraction and search for similarsignatures, and correcting by adding/removing components.

Signature comparer 77 may perform identical signature searching viadirect indexing of the signature using string representation indexing,hashing etc.

Signature comparer 77 may apply the same process to the handledcomponent set-based signature. Thus, the searching is performedaccording to multiple signature versions, and the results are united.Signature comparer 77 may also filter results according to theirsemantic distance using the signature comparison methods outlined above.

Signature comparer 77 may perform similar signature searching for eachsignature in many ways, such as the use of map signature vectorrepresentation into vector space and using Euclidean distance as thefirst approximation. This may be assisted by embedding algorithms whichreduce the number of dimensions in the vector space (e.g. such as thearticle by Hjaltason G., Samet H.—2000 “Contractive Embedding Methodsfor Similarity Searching in Metric Spaces.”http://www.cs.umd.edu/˜hjs/pubs/metricpruning.pdf)

Signature comparer 77 may perform searching using (for example) any ofthe known nearest point searching methods in the vector space usingMinHash, SimHash, using attribute relational graphs and by using similarsignature searching with added/removed components as described hereinabove.

Signature comparer 77 may repeat the process until a reasonable numberof matches are found (breaking or possibly accumulating matching layoutsfound) or a given number of searches.

If a resulting layout contains extraneous components, matcher 66 mayremove these extraneous components in the component matching process (asdescribed in more detail herein below). If a resulting layout has lesscomponents than the handled component set, the additional handledcomponent set components may be added when applied (e.g. inside or belowthe layout as noted below).

Layout database coordinator 75 may return matching layouts which providealternatives to each of the sent signatures in each of the 3 signatureclasses: full page, partial and segment.

SBL coordinator 161 may then send the partial layouts (only) to partiallayout handler 162 to be “completed”. Partial layout handler 162 maysend the sets of missing components (i.e., [handled component set] minusthe specific [partial layout]) to AGL handler 62 for completion.

Reference is now made to FIG. 27 which illustrates the creation ofpartial layouts. Layout A (which includes the handled component set)consists of 3 main sections: the first section a includes 2 picturecomponent and 4 text component substantial to the page; the secondsection b which a Facebook Like button x, a picture component, a Sharebutton y and a small notification text component z; The third section ccontains 5 picture components which are again important to the page.

Page analyzer 44 may determine that the least important components inthe page are 3 of the 4 components in section b which are (in ascendingorder of importance) the like button x (least important), the sharebutton y and the notification text z. All other components areconsidered more important than these 3 components.

Page analyzer 44 may thus create 3 partial layouts. The first layout Bmay include all components in A except for the like button x. The secondlayout C may include all components in layout A except for the likebutton x and the share button y. The third layout D may include allcomponents in A except for the like button x, the share button y and thenotification text z.

Page analyzer 44 may send the three partial layouts B, C and D, togetherwith the removed components (x for B, x/y for C, x/y/z for DE), thematching signatures and layout packages (for each of the three) tolayout searcher and generator 60, where they are routed to SBL handler64 and to partial layout handler 162. Partial layout handler 162 maylocate alternative layouts for each of B, C and D. Partial layouthandler 162 may further request AGL handler 62 to create automaticlayouts for each of the removed component sets (e.g. 3 automatic layoutsfor x, x/y and x/y/z). Partial layout handler 162 may then append thecorresponding automatic layout to each of the located alternate layoutsfor B, C and D to create 3 combined layouts which are the ones combinedwith the content of the original layout A and returned by the partiallayout handler 162.

It will be appreciated that the selected least important components maybe anywhere on the page and in particular may be intermixed betweenother components (more important or not). In the final combined layout,these least important (and removed) components may typically be re-addedat the bottom of the suggested layout.

Reference is now made to FIG. 28 which illustrates a simplified versionof the working of the segment layout mechanism. Layout A (which includesthe handled component set) contains in this example 2 text and 2 picturecomponents in its top part A1, and 2 text, 1 picture and 1 tablecomponents in its bottom part A2.

Page analyzer 44 may have previously recognized that layout A may beeasily divided by a horizontal end-to-end separator X into the twosegment layouts B (containing the components in A1) and C (containingthe components in A1)

Page analyzer 44 may have further recognized (using the semantic linkhandler 141) that the 2 picture components and 2 text components in A1are 2 picture-caption pairs, and thus it may not further sub-divide A1into two sub-parts. Similarly, page analyzer 44 may have determined thatthe 2 text components of A2 are related (for example, due to a manualdynamic link anchor connecting them) and do not sub-divide A2.

Page analyzer 44 may send the two segment layouts B and C, together withtheir matching signatures and layout packages (for each of C and D) tolayout searcher and generator 60, in which they are routed to SBLhandler 64 and to segment layout handler 163. Segment layout handler 163may send the signatures for B and C to layout coordinator 75 which maylocate matching suggested layouts D and E (respectively).

Segment layout handler 163 may further perform the matching between Band D and may create a combined and adapted layout F—which uses thelayout format from the located layout D and the component content fromsegment layout B. Similarly, Segment layout handler 163 may performmatching between layouts C and E to create a combined and adapted layoutG.

Segment layout handler 163 may then combine layouts F and G (byappending G to the bottom of F) and may create the merged layout H, inwhich the upper part H1 is taken from F and the lower part H2 is takenfrom G.

It will be appreciated that in the actual implementation, the search forsuggested layouts (D and E above) may return multiple options for each(e.g. D1 . . . Dn and E1 . . . Em), which may be combined in n×m ways.Segment layout handler 163 may create all n×m combinations, or mayfilter them according to predefined rules criteria as discussed hereinabove.

AGL handler 62 may send back (for each partial layout) a matchingautomatically generated layout created from the components missing inthe specific partial layout. Partial layout handler 162 may combine thepartial layout(s) with their matching “missing component layout” fromAGL handler 62 and create a new completed layout and return it to SBLcoordinator 161. Partial layout handler 162 may add (for example) theautomatically generated “missing component layout” below the partiallayout thus combining them.

In an alternative embodiment, partial layout handler 162 may send theactual partial layout to AGL handler 62 and have the AGL handler 62 useit as a “seed” and add the missing components to it directly.

SBL coordinator 161 may send the set of located segment layouts tosegment layout handler 163. Segment layout handler 163 may combine theper-segment alternatives to create combined full page layouts. In thetypical case in which the segments were created by horizontal end-to-endsplitting of the handled component set into segments, segment layouthandler 163 may combine the per-segment alternatives by putting theper-segment alternatives one below the other according to the originalsplitting order. In the more complex cases, the segment layout handler163 may replace the area occupied by each original segment with theper-segment alternatives.

Segment layout handler 163 may create numerous combined layouts bycombining all possible suggested per-layout alternatives in all possiblecombinations and return them to the SBL coordinator 161. The segmentlayout handler 163 may also filter the combined layouts according tospecific rules before returning them to the SBL coordinator 161. Suchrules may define which layout combinations have better quality,similarly to the rule types described herein above for layout qualityrater 47.

In an alternative embodiment, SBL handler 162 may directly search for acombination of layouts with together match the signature of the handledcomponent set. It will be appreciated that this may be computationallyexpensive, since it requires searching in the space of layout pairs.

One solution is for SBL handler 162 to perform a linear scan of layoutshaving a smaller number of components than the handled component set,“subtract” each result from the handled component set (using vectorsubtraction), and search for possible matching layouts to the remainingcomponents. If a sufficiently small number of components remain, theycan be added below the suggested layout (to allow manualrearrangement)—possibly subject to arrangement using an auto generatedlayout.

SBL coordinator 161 may then merge the returned layouts for the 3signature classes (page, completed partial, combined segments) and sendthem to matcher 66.

Matcher 66 may attempt to find a match between the handled component setof the incoming request page and every layout that may have beenretrieved by SBL handler 64. Matcher 66 may construct a set of matchedcomponents (from both layouts) which is a subset of both, oralternatively may only allow exact match to be created.

It will be appreciated that each layout sent to matcher 66 may beconsidered a candidate layout since unless a suitable match is not foundbetween the handled component set of the incoming request page and acandidate layout—and in this case, the layout is rejected before it ispresented to the user as a valid alternative layout for his page. Asdiscussed herein above, layouts created by AGL hander 62 should providea successful match as they are created based on the specific componentlist provided to AGL handler 62 (and preserving their website buildingsystem component ID—thus allowing the use of exact ID-base matching).This is to ensure that for all candidate layouts found, an accuratematch may be made and therefore only relevant layouts may be presentedto the user. It will be appreciated that the page level objects (fromthe incoming request page and the associated page of the selectedcandidate layout page) may include additional non-component informationsuch as underlying template pointers, decorations, background designinformation etc.

It will be further appreciated that the layout level objects (handledcomponent set of the current requested incoming page and candidatelayout) may usually be a subset of their corresponding page levelobjects (i.e. [RL]⊆[RP],[CL]⊆[CP]) (RL=requested layout=handledcomponent set, RP=requested incoming page, CL=candidate layout,CP=candidate page) as the page level objects may contain componentswhich are not part of the current layout (e.g., decorations, componentsmarked with “do not search according to this”, omitted component, lockedcomponents etc.). It will be appreciated that the candidate pageinformation may be retrieved from the associated layout package storedin layout database 70 as well as other useful information such assemantic types, links and dynamic layout links as discussed hereinabove. However, this is not always the case since component merger 144and component splitter 146 may cause the layout level to contain suchunited/split components which are not included in the page level object.

It will be appreciated that the handled component set may be further“reduced” as the user may request searching based on a selected subsetof the components in requested incoming page (instead of the entirecurrent page).

It will also be appreciated that signature comparer 77 may perform atthe layout level, i.e. the actual signature-based matching is betweensignatures extracted from the handled component set and the candidatelayout.

It will be further appreciated that matcher 66 may create a matchedcomponent subset of the handled component set and the matched subset ofthe candidate layout. The matched component subset of the requestedincoming page and the matched subset of the candidate layout may notalways be of the same size. Matcher 66 may, for example, match an imagecomponent and a text component (in the incoming page) together with asingle (image+caption) component in a candidate layout.

It will be appreciated that if a candidate layout is an automaticallygenerated layout, the situation may differ since the automaticallygenerated layout (candidate layout) is created directly from thecomponents in the handled component set. Thus, there is no separatecontaining page associated with the candidate layout and the matchingbetween the handled component set and the candidate layout is alwaysexact and performed based on having identical component IDs (asdiscussed in more detail herein below). Since the layouts are identical,the matched components subsets are also identical.

As discussed herein above, matcher 66 may match some or all of thecomponents in the handled component set and the candidate layoutaccording to system defined component ID's.

It will be appreciated that for automatically generated layouts,ID-based matching always works, since the components included in theautomatically generated layout are the same components that are includedin the handled component set.

In the specific scenario in which the incoming request page and thecandidate page are both pages derived from a common template (or haveanother inheritance-related relationship), matcher 66 may also performID-based matching.

It will be appreciated that in other scenarios (e.g. regular layoutsfrom layout database 70), ID-based matching is not suitable and matcher66 may use attribute-based component matching instead.

Matcher 66 may perform attribute-based component matching by dividingthe components (in the handled component set and the candidate layout)into classes according to their semantic types.

Matcher 66 may typically use very abstract semantic types (i.e. high onthe semantic tree) as classes, so to provide wider matching. Forexample, a classification may use 4 classes based on major semantictypes such as text, image, galleries and “other components”.

Once matcher 66 has classified the components accordingly, it may sortthe components in each class according to their size or possibly—inparticular for text—their amount of content. The latter is done so alarge text area containing small amount of text may be matched with asmaller text area which might be more suitable. Matcher 66 may furthersort components having identical (or near-identical) areas according toadditional attributes such as aspect ratio, position on screen etc.

It will be appreciated that such matching may omit components withextreme sizes (too large or too small) which cannot be matched withsimilar size components in the matched layout. Matcher 66 may also omitcases when the given layouts have conflicting size such as a Facebooklike button component that has a fixed size and a contact form that hasa minimum width.

Once matcher 66 has sorted the components in each class, it may use amatching algorithm to create the pairing as described herein above suchas a greedy algorithm, the Hungarian algorithm or anything similar. Itwill be appreciated that components in each category are separatelymatched.

Matcher 66 may also use semantic link information created for thehandled component set (during processing by page analyzer 44) andinformation retrieved for candidate layouts such as “components A and Bshould be close together” or “component A must be above component B withno inferring components”. Matcher 66 may try to satisfy theserequirements before matching the remaining components.

Matcher 66 may also use information from cross-category semantic links(i.e. links between component of different component categories, such asimage and text components) when forming the matching. In such a case,matcher 66 may perform the matching sequentially (e.g. first matchingall text components, then image components, etc.). The matching for agiven category may rely on the matching done for previous categories.

Reference is now made to FIG. 29 which illustrates attribute-basedcomponent matching integrating semantic linking information. As is shownin the figure:

The handled component set has 2 sets of components (picture+caption)marked a+aa, b+bb. Earlier on in the process, semantic link handler 141may have created the semantic pairings [a]⇔[aa], [b]⇔[bb].

A candidate layout is retrieved with 2 sets of components [c]+[cc],[d]+[dd]. This candidate layout includes (in its layout package) thesemantic links embodying the [c]⇔[cc], [d]⇔[dd] semantic pairing.

Matcher 66 may first match the text category, resulting in the matching[aa]=>[cc], [bb]=>[dd], followed by matching the picture category.

When matcher 66 searches for a match for component a, it may see that itis semantically paired with component aa which was matched withcomponent cc as component cc is semantically paired with picturecomponent c, matcher 66 matches component a to component c directly andremoves them from the sets of components to be paired (component a fromthe current layout component set, component c from the candidate layoutcomponent set).

It will be appreciated that in FIG. 29 the components in the currentlayout and the candidate layout do not match exactly, as the currentlayout has 4 additional text components whereas the selected layout has6 additional text components and an additional data table component.This is permissible, since the current layout and the candidate layoutare not required to match exactly.

It will be appreciated that matcher 66 may run on large numbers ofcandidate layouts from layout database 70 as produced by layout searcherand generator 60. It will be further appreciated that not all layoutsfound may have a successful match.

It will be further appreciated that all candidate layouts with asuccessful match may be forwarded to layout filter and ranker 45 to befiltered and ranked. Layout filter and ranker 45 may then forward thetop (for example) ten ranked candidate layouts to layout adapter andapplier 50 to adapt the current page to the new layout and apply anycontent accordingly. Layout adaptation may include a number of types ofadaptations, such as component layout adaptation, e.g. size and position(the primary adaptation), component type adaptation; color schemeadaptation and decoration components from the selected page. System 100may provide a user interface (UI), possible integrated with that of pageeditor 30, to allow the user to select the desired layout and to specifywhich types of adaptation to perform.

In an alternative embodiment to the present invention, matcher 66 may bepart of layout adapter and applier 50. I.e. layout searcher andgenerator 60 may not apply matching to all candidate layouts, and onlyonce the user has chosen his selected layout the matching process maytake place. This may be less computationally expensive as the matchingprocess is applied to the selected layout only and not to all locatedlayouts

In yet another embodiment, matching may take place after a preliminaryfiltering of the selected layouts by layout filter and ranker 45, andbefore the suggested layouts are presented to the user. Once a user hasselected his desired layout, layout adapter and applier 50 may applyformat and content from matched component subset of the selected layoutto the matched subset of the current layout.

Reference is now made to FIG. 30 which illustrates the elements oflayout adapter and applier 50. Layout adapter and applier 50 maycomprise a dynamic layout handler 52, a container changes applier 53, asplit/merge component handler 54, a remaining component handler 55, acomponent type conversion handler 56, a component attribute applier 57and a post processor 58.

It will be appreciated that layout adapter and applier 50 may copy overthe main attribute values (such as position, size and z-priority) forthe matched components from the selected layout to the handled componentset. Layout adapter and applier 50 may also handle any unmatchedcomponents between the handled component set and the handled componentset matched components and between the candidate layout and thecandidate layout matched component set. It may also handle any remainingcomponents that appear in either the handled component set or thecandidate layout (but not both) or those that appear in the incomingrequest page or the selected layout (but not both). Once layout adapterand applier 50 has adapted the candidate layout accordingly, previewer32 may present the candidate options to the user via previewer 32 inorder for a user to select his desired selected layout.

Component type conversion handler 56 may convert the type of eachcomponent in the matched subset of the handled component set if twocomponents of different types have been matched.

Component attribute applier 57 may copy the position, size and z-orderof the components of the matched subset of the candidate layout.

Component attribute applier 57 may also apply other componentattributes, such as the colors, style or display properties of thecomponents (e.g. the number of row/columns in a gallery component).

Component attribute applier 57 may apply the color scheme (as discussedin US Patent Publication No. US-2014-0237429 entitled “A System forSupporting Flexible Color Assignment in Complex Documents” published 21Aug. 2013, incorporated herein by reference and assigned to the commonassignee of the current invention).

Dynamic layout handler 52 may copy over any dynamic layout explicitanchors and relationships to the new layout as applicable. It will beappreciated that layout adapter and applier 50 may break some anchorswhen (for example) one of the anchored components is not included in themapping. It will further be appreciated that once the layout (and otherinformation) has been applied, dynamic layout handler 52 may applydynamic layout processing so to handle component size/position changes(e.g. if it has to immediately apply a component size change due tolarger amount of content in the handled component set when compared tothe selected layout).

It will be appreciated that changing a component type while preservingthe content and parameters of the component (e.g. display parameters ofa gallery) may require system 100 to support component type conversion,e.g. support assigning the content and attributes of a component of onetype to a component of another type whenever possible.

Component type conversion handler 56 may define specific conversionrules and procedures to handle specific type conversions such as do notconvert a video to an image—keep the original video component type, whenconverting a third party application, only convert to a new third partyapplication of identical type (e-shop to e-shop etc.).

As discussed herein above in relation to container handler 143,containers may be handled in a number of ways, including keeping thecontainer and using hierarchical signatures, flattening the containerand attaching the contained components to the parent page, flatteningcombined with container reconstruction, converting single-componentcontainers to regular components, converting the container to a newdummy component (discarding the contained sub-components) and assigningthe type of the dominant sub-component inside the container.

Container changes applier 53 may use asymmetric handling: applyingcontainer flattening on the stored layouts side (i.e. in the selectedlayout), and dominant type assignment on the handled componentset/current layout side. In this scenario, the selected layout mayrepresent an incoming requested page container by a single placeholdercomponent—matched with another single component in the selected page.

Container changes applier 53 may adapt this placeholder component to thematching component in the selected page. It may replace the placeholdercomponent with the original container (including the sub-componentsoriginally contained inside it).

Container changes applier 53 may also adapt the container to the size,position and z-order of the matching selected page component. It mayalso adjust the relative size and position of the sub-component insidethe container to the new size and possibly apply dynamic layout tocompensate for the changes. It will be appreciated that containerchanges applier 53 may perform recursively on all containers at alllevels.

It will also be appreciated that in addition to containers there may beother scenarios in which two or more original current page componentscould be merged into a single current layout component. These mayinclude, for example components which overlap too much that have beenunited into a single component, text components above each other whichwere stitched together, multiple image components stitched together andmultiple image components converted into a gallery.

In all of these cases, split/merged component handler 54 may draw aminimal enclosing rectangle surrounding the pre-merge component set, andthis rectangle is used to set the size and position of the dummyplaceholder component. Thus split/merged component handler 54 resizesand moves the contained components as discussed herein above forcontainers when creating a match to the placeholder component (on thecurrent page side).

It will be appreciated that [A]−[B] refers to elements in [A] which arenot in [B] (also known as relative complement. It will be furtherappreciated that there might be additional components not included inthe matching. For example, the difference of the components between thehandled component set and the selected layout i.e. components in thepages omitted from the compared layouts.

There also may be components in the compared layouts (handled componentset and selected layout) which were not matched by matcher 66.

Remaining component handler 55 may handle components which appear in theincoming request page but are not included in the selected layout (suchas decorations, or unmatched components in non-exact-matching scenario)by dividing them into two-categories—layout relative and non-layoutrelative components. Layout-relative components are page componentswhich are related to the layout component (but are not part of thelayout component set itself). Remaining component handler 55 mayidentify such a relationship through explicit specification, proximity,dynamic layout anchoring or component content analysis. Remainingcomponent handler 55 may move and resize these components together withthe layout components to which they are related.

Non-layout-relative components are the additional components in the pagewhich are not in the layout and are not layout relative. These mayinclude (in particular) components which have been specified as lockedby the user and they are kept in place and not moved or re sized.

It will be appreciated that components which appear in the selected pagebut are not included in the selected layout may be considered non-layoutcomponents (decoration or otherwise excluded). Remaining componenthandler 55 may ignore them and may not transfer them as part of thelayout adaptation.

Remaining component handler 55 may support an exceptional case for thetransfer of non-layout components (or other page elements) which isimportant for the layout. An example would be a non-layout backgroundpicture component to which the layout components have been carefullyadapted (e.g. the components reside in “holes” in the picture). Thecomponent may be marked so that it is copied over in case of adaptationeven through it is not a part of the regular layout. In fact, such abackground picture may even be marked as “critical”, meaning it wouldoverride any existing current page background picture (if such oneexists).

Remaining component handler 55 may handle layout components which arenot in the matching as follows. For unmatched components in the currentpage, i.e. components that appear in the current layout but not in thecurrent layout matched set, remaining component handler 55 may instructAGL handler 62 to create an automatically generated layout based onthese remaining components. Remaining component handler 55 may thenarrange this newly-created automatically generated layout below thebottom-most component in the adapted current matched component set (i.e.the current matched component set adapted based on layout informationfrom the selected layout. Remaining component handler 55 may merge theautomatically generated layout with the adapted current matchedcomponent set.

Remaining component handler 55 may ignore unmatched components in thecandidate layout and may not transfer them as part of the layout.

It will be appreciated that all changes made by remaining componenthandler 55 may affect additional components through dynamic layoutprocessing of the page (e.g. moving components pushing down othercomponents). Thus, the user may edit the adapted incoming request pageand candidate layout via page editor 30 and may determine how to handleeach component (e.g. moving it, discarding it or otherwise modifyingit).

It will be appreciated that page analyzer 44 may perform manytransformations (as described herein above) which should be closed—i.e.reversed or handled before the final process. For example, containerhandler 143 may perform container analysis and transformations such asthe replacement of tightly wrapped containers which may have to beundone on the final page. Post processor 58 may perform all reversetransformations where required. It will also be appreciated that it mayreverse transformations performed by semantic link analyzer withinmatcher 66 and container changes applier 53.

It will be appreciated that layout adapter and applier 50 may apply toparts of pages or split pages, since it may be required to applymultiple layouts to multiple page parts in pages which have beensegmented.

Once layout adapter and applier 50 has finished—the resulting new layoutmay be presented to the user via previewer 32.

Thus system 100 may be used to provide a user with semantically similarlayouts to a current page for use which may be automatically updatedformat and content wise.

It will be appreciated that system 100 may allow the construction of adesigner layout community in which high quality layouts could bemarketed. This may act similarly to an application store. Once a layoutor layout family has been purchased, these additional layouts would beavailable to the purchasing user and used in his or her layout queries.Users may also follow specific designers (whose style they prefer),create private layout libraries etc.

System 100 may further include a mechanism for the promotion of specificlayouts and for the creation of a layout marketplace (including promotedsearch capabilities which may be integrated with the layout ranking bylayout filter and ranker 45 as described herein above.

It will be appreciated that the discussion of system 100 has beenlimited to searching according to the components in a single page whichare used as the search key (the handled component set). In analternative embodiment, system 100 may also be applied to searchingaccording to multiple pages (i.e. multiple handled component sets) andthus used for template selection expansion. An example of this is wheninitially creating a page and the designer is presented with a set ofpossible templates (e.g. page or page section templates). The user mayselect a subset of the offered templates and expand it using “search formore such templates”. Another use may be when performing a selection (inlayout database 70) based on the currently edited page; the user mayselect a subset of the offered layouts and expand it (by searching foradditional layouts semantically equivalent to the selected subset). Thisis a “search based on search results” capability.

In this scenario layout searcher and generator 60 may make multipleselections using the signature extracted from each handled componentset. It may unite the multiple selected results and then diversify thesuggested results according to the multiple handled component sets, soto locate suggested layouts as visually different as possible from eachof the handled component sets (and not just from the handled componentset used to search for the specific result set).

Reference is now made to FIG. 31 which illustrates a joint resultdiversification for multiple layout database queries. As is illustrated,a request is made by a user for alternative layouts when 3 templates areavailable (e.g. under a given template category) T1, T2 and T3.

Page analyzer 44 may extract from these 3 templates the handledcomponent sets HCS1, HCS2 and HCS3.

Based on these 3 handled component sets the layout searcher andgenerator 60 may selects the 3 semantically similar results sets B1, B2and B3, each of which contain additional possible templates. Forexample, B1 contains the 3 templates pages h, i and j which are mostsemantically similar to HCS1.

Layout ranker and filter 45 may jointly evaluate all locatedpages/layouts in all results sets for B for diversity, by comparing eachpossible layout against all layouts—including original layouts (in setA) as well as all layouts in set B (as is shown for e and fin thefigure). It will be appreciated that layouts may be compared tonon-semantically-equivalent layouts for diversity.

Layout searcher and generator 60 may create the expanded suggestedtemplate list, which may include the original A layout, as well as someselected layouts from B (e.g. e, g, h and i). The user may selecttemplates from this expanded list to create P, the actual page.

It will also be appreciated that system 100 may also be used to providelayout and formatting to pages containing data collections that do nothave a current design. Such pages may be uniform in structure, or eachmay have its data structure. Examples includes pages imported fromsources such external databases, XML record or RSS data feeds. Anadditional data source may be a manual data entry editor, which may bevery quick to use, since no formatting should be defined—just the rawdata.

In such a scenario, system 100 may review the data for the current page,and create a signature based on the data types of the imported data.Such data type determination may be based on actual specified data types(e.g. database field types, XML entity types etc.), data typesdetermined by analysis of the content of the imported data (e.g.recognizing text field or type and format of included media files) anddata types specified by the user through an editor attached to theimport module. For example, system 100 may determine that a given datafield is a text field, but the user may provide further information(e.g. classifying the field as title text rather than regular text).

In addition to the data types, system may determine additionalinformation from the field, such as expected size (based on the amountof content or the size of provided media files). System 100 may then usethe gathered information to create a semantic signature as describedherein above, and use this signature to search for semantically matchinglayouts.

Once an appropriate candidate layout is selected, the information fromthe candidate layout is used to create a layout for the existing data.System 100 may repeat this process for all imported pages, and thesystem may re-use selected layout determinations made for previous pagesfor the new page (e.g. when pages use the same XML schema or just haveidentical/similar fields).

In this embodiment, signature extractor 147 may extract the signaturefrom the set of current data fields (which serves as a handled componentset), instead of being extracted from an actual page or part thereof.

Diversifier 49 may process the located layouts, but without comparingthem to the non-existent “current design”. Layout adapter and applier 50may copy over the full set of attributes (as well as decorationcomponents otherwise ignored) from the selected layout.

It will be appreciated that a website building system typically providesa number of templates for users to use as a foundation for theirapplication. Templates provide ready-made pages, designs, components,content, color schemes etc. and make the users' job considerably easier.The site is then created as a series of modifications to the templates(changes, additions and deletions). However, the site structure becomestightly coupled with the selected template, and if the user desires toswitch to another template it is often difficult, if not outrightimpossible.

In an alternative embodiment, system 100 may apply a new layout to theexisting site based on existing template, and thereby switch to adifferent template. In this scenario, system 100 may allow the user toarbitrarily select a selected layout from the full or a partial pool oflayouts, without limiting the selecting to suggested layouts having asubstantial semantic similarity to the current page. This way, the usercould switch to any desired template—even if it is substantiallydifferent (semantically) from the existing one. Of course, if theswitched-to template is wildly different than the existing one, theadaptation to the new template would suffer in quality.

System 100 typically has full information regarding the originaltemplate page used to create the current users' page. Thus, system 100may distinguish between the underlying template definitions and latermodification. Layout adapter and applier 50 may be modified so to handlethe underlying template first, and then re-apply the later changes—thusallowing smooth template changing.

It will be further appreciated that website building system vendor mayfurther facilitate template switching by creating families of templateswhich have an underlying mapping between their members (e.g. based oncommon IDs inherited from a single master template). Such underlyingmapping could be augmented by layout adapter and applier 50 by matchingadditional components. Thus, the user would be able to switch betweentemplates in the same family very easily.

While certain features of the invention have been illustrated anddescribed herein, many modifications, substitutions, changes, andequivalents will now occur to those of ordinary skill in the art. It is,therefore, to be understood that the appended claims are intended tocover all such modifications and changes as fall within the true spiritof the invention.

Unless specifically stated otherwise, as apparent from the precedingdiscussions, it is appreciated that, throughout the specification,discussions utilizing terms such as “processing,” “computing,”“calculating,” “determining,” or the like, refer to the action and/orprocesses of a computer, computing system, or similar electroniccomputing device that manipulates and/or transforms data represented asphysical, such as electronic, quantities within the computing system'sregisters and/or memories into other data similarly represented asphysical quantities within the computing system's memories, registers orother such information storage, transmission or display devices.

Embodiments of the present invention may include apparatus forperforming the operations herein. This apparatus may be speciallyconstructed for the desired purposes, or it may comprise ageneral-purpose computer selectively activated or reconfigured by acomputer program stored in the computer. Such a computer program may bestored in a computer readable storage medium, such as, but not limitedto, any type of disk, including floppy disks, optical disks,magnetic-optical disks, read-only memories (ROMs), compact discread-only memories (CD-ROMs), random access memories (RAMs),electrically programmable read-only memories (EPROMs), electricallyerasable and programmable read only memories (EEPROMs), magnetic oroptical cards, Flash memory, or any other type of media suitable forstoring electronic instructions and capable of being coupled to acomputer system bus.

The processes and displays presented herein are not inherently relatedto any particular computer or other apparatus. Various general-purposesystems may be used with programs in accordance with the teachingsherein, or it may prove convenient to construct a more specializedapparatus to perform the desired method. The desired structure for avariety of these systems will appear from the description below. Inaddition, embodiments of the present invention are not described withreference to any particular programming language. It will be appreciatedthat a variety of programming languages may be used to implement theteachings of the invention as described herein.

What is claimed is:
 1. A website building system implementable on acomputing device; said system comprising: a layout database to store atleast one layout and an associated signature wherein said signaturerepresents a semantic composition of said at least one layout; a pageanalyzer to at least generate an associated signature for a usersupplied handled component set; a signature comparer to perform acomparison of said signature of said user supplied handled component setwith said associated signature of said at least one layout stored onsaid layout database; a layout searcher and generator to acquire from atleast said layout database a set of candidate layouts according to theresults of said signature comparer and wherein said candidate layoutsare visually different and semantically similar from said user suppliedhandled component set; and a layout adapter and applier to adapt saidhandled component set to a selected layout from said set of candidatelayouts.
 2. The system according to claim 1 and also comprising: a pagespider to retrieve at least one of: new and updated website pages,templates and manually created layouts from an associated applicationrepository and pages from external sources; and a layout filter andranker to filter and rank at least one of: said at least one layoutgenerated by said page analyzer and said candidate layout.
 3. The systemaccording to claim 1 and wherein said signature is based on the semanticclassification categories of the components of said website buildingsystem.
 4. The system according to claim 1 and wherein said usersupplied handled component set represents at least one of: an entirepage and a subset of components of said page.
 5. The system according toclaim 1 and wherein said candidate layouts are acquired based on atleast one of: a full signature of said user supplied handled componentset, a partial signature of said user supplied handled component set, atleast one segment signature of said user supplied handled component setand an automatically generated layout.
 6. The system according to claim1 and wherein said layout database is at least one of: user specific andgroup specific.
 7. The system according to claim 1 and wherein saidcomparison is based on at least one of: semantic abstraction andsemantic distance metrics.
 8. The system according to claim 1 andwherein said page analyzer comprises: a semantic link handler toidentify semantic links which connect at least two components in atleast one of: at least one website page and said user supplied handledcomponent set and to build a relevant data structure; a layout splitterto divide at least one of: said at least one website page and said usersupplied handled component set into segments based on at least one of:geometrical considerations, said semantic links and dynamic layoutanchors; and a signature extractor to extract at least one of: a fullsemantic signature and a partial semantic signature in said at least onelayouts and said user supplied handled component set and wherein saidsignature extractor performs at least one of: semantic type mapping ofsaid components, dividing sematic types based on visual properties ofsaid components and generating signature elements based on multiplecomponent semantic types; and at least one of: a page type identifier todetermine the page type of at least one of: said at least one websitepage and said user supplied handled component set; and a componentsplitter to split at least one component of at least one of: saidwebpage and said user supplied handled component set based on thecontent of said at least one component; and a component filter to filterto filter out unsuitable components for said signature extractor; and acomponent merger to unite at least two components for layout processingand signature extraction by said signature extractor; and a containerhandler to reduce the amount of different page signatures by performingat least one of: using hierarchical signatures, container flattening,container flattening and reconstruction, single component containerreplacement; dominant type selection and recursive implementation; andwherein said page analyzer generates at least one of a single full pagelayout, multiple partial page layouts, multiple segmented layouts and anassociated layout package after processing by at least one of: saidlayout splitter, said signature extractor, said page type identifier,said semantic link handler; said component splitter; said componentfilter; said component merger and said container handler.
 9. The systemaccording to claim 8 and wherein said hierarchical signature representsthe original hierarchical structure of said at least one layout.
 10. Thesystem according to claim 8 and wherein the components of said multiplepartial page layouts and said multiple segmented layouts are subsets ofsaid single full page layout.
 11. The system according to claim 8 andwherein said associated layout package comprises at least one of: thehandled component set for said webpage, page type indication, componentand container split/merge information, said dynamic layout anchors,semantic links, component relevance information, page screenshot, saidassociated signatures and said associated web-pages.
 12. The systemaccording to claim 2 and wherein said layout filter and rankercomprises: a visual page comparer to compare at least one of: the levelof visual similarity between said at least one layout and other layoutsin said layout database and the level of visual similarity between saiduser supplied handled component set and at least one of said candidatelayouts; a layout quality rater to calculate a quality score in order tofilter out low-quality pages of at least one of: said at least onelayout and said candidate layouts based on at least one of pagestatistical metrics, page visual attributes, content and a layoutquality rater learning system; a ranker to order at least one of said atleast one layout and said candidate layouts according to at least oneof: component size matching, semantic similarity to said signature ofsaid user supplied handled component set and component size matching;and a diversifier to ensure visual diversity between at least one of thefollowing pairs: said user supplied handled component set and saidcandidate layouts and said at least two layouts stored in said layoutdatabase.
 13. The system according to claim 1 and wherein said layoutsearcher and generator comprises: a server based layout handler toperform at least one of: retrieving said candidate layouts from saidlayout database, completing partial candidate layouts and combining ofat least two of segmented candidate layouts; an automatically generatedlayout handler to perform at least one of: creating said automaticallygenerated layouts based on the components in said handled component setand completing said partial candidate layouts retrieved by said serverbased layout handler; and a matcher to create a match of componentsbetween said handled component set and said candidate layouts whereinsaid match is at least one of: exact and partial.
 14. The systemaccording to claim 13 and wherein said automatically generated layouthandler comprises: an automatically generated layout coordinator toreceive at least one of: a base component set of said handled componentset and a base component set of components missing from an associatedsaid partial candidate layout from said server based layout handler andto create multiple possible algorithmically-generated layouts from saidbase component set; and at least one of: a column layout generator toplace components from said base component set into one column after theother and a main and side bar layout generator to place components fromsaid base component set in a main column followed by a smaller side-barand a rule based generator to place components from said base componentset according to pre-defined placement rules.
 15. The system accordingto claim 13 and wherein said server based layout handler comprises: aserver based layout coordinator to perform at least one of: receivingsaid handled component set and said associated signatures, querying saidlayout database using said associated signatures, retrieving said set ofcandidate layouts and coordinating completion of at least one of: saidpartial candidate layouts and segmented candidate layouts retrieved fromsaid layout database; a partial layout handler to send componentsmissing from said partial candidate layouts to said automaticallygenerated layout handler and to use the resulting automaticallygenerated layout to complete said partial candidate layouts; and asegment layout handler to combine said segmented candidate layouts intoa full layout according to pre-defined rules.
 16. The system accordingto claim 13 and wherein said selected layout is based on said match ofcomponents.
 17. The system according to claim 13 and wherein said layoutadapter and applier comprises: a component type conversion handler toconvert the type of each component in said handled component set to thetype of each matching component in said selected layout; a componentattribute applier to apply attributes to components in said handledcomponent set from said selected layout; and at least one of: a dynamiclayout handler to transfer over said dynamic layout explicit anchors andrelationships from said handled component set to said selected layout;and a container change applier to adapt containers from said handledcomponent set to said selected layout; and a split/merged componenthandler to perform at least one of: splitting and merging components insaid selected layout; and a remaining component handler to handlecomponents which appear in said handled component set but are notincluded in said selected layout; and a post processor to performreverse transformations made by said page analyzer when necessary.
 18. Amethod implementable on a computing device; said method comprising:storing at least one layout and an associated signature wherein saidsignature represents a semantic composition of said at least one layout;generating an associated signature for a user supplied handled componentset; performing a comparison of said signature of said user suppliedhandled component set with said associated signature of said at leastone layout stored on said layout database; acquiring from at least saidlayout database a set of candidate layouts according to the results ofsaid performing a comparison and wherein said candidate layouts arevisually different and semantically similar from said user suppliedhandled component set; and adapting said handled component set to aselected layout from said set of candidate layouts.
 19. The methodaccording to claim 18 and also comprising: retrieving at least one of:new and updated website pages, templates and manually created layoutsfrom an associated application repository and pages from externalsources; and filtering and ranking at least one of: said at least onelayout generated by said generating and said candidate layout.
 20. Themethod according to claim 18 and wherein said signature is based on thesemantic classification categories of the components of said websitebuilding system.